All these concepts interact in many ways. The scheme below illustrates this interaction:<\/p>\n
![\"Social](\"http:\/\/www.irishwonder.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/12\/socialbookmarking1.gif\")
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To explain this a bit: search engines\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 personalized search solutions, for example, make extensive use of social (to different level) bookmarking and tagging. They are so much interested in social bookmarking that Yahoo has recently bought del.icio.us and Flickr – two sites with large communities and growing popularity, and Furl, another social bookmarking service, is owned by LookSmart. RSS feeds can be incorporated into personalized home pages. Often, RSS feds are also provided for search results. Blog search is a separate feature Google and Yahoo have introduced last year.<\/p>\n
Why are search engines so interested in all these concepts? Well, after all the manipulations their algorithms have been subjected to, they want genuine user data, the kind of data that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s difficult to fake – and in this case, the community principle and personalization are very helpful. The way most social bookmarking services work is based on social interaction and public opinion rather than smart algorithmic filtering. For example, Wink<\/a> is a social bookmarking search engine that searches through bookmarks from several different services including those its own users have created and ranks the search results based on what those services\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 users think of each bookmark.<\/p>\n So what should SEOs do about it all? – Certainly, we should find ways to use these new concepts in our work to rank our sites better as well as to create additional exposure for them and brink traffic independent of search engines. Social bookmarking is a powerful concept and I see it growing even further in the next few years.<\/p>\n OK you may say, how can this be achieved? – Well, remember the old talk about building communities? – This comes very handy in this case. Of course you can try to work your way to popularity in those social bookmarking services by creating numerous accounts trying to spam them the way search engines are spammed – but this is not very effective. Social hacking is the way to go here. create one account just to introduce your site to the community – as many social bookmarking sites list the most recently added public bookmarks on their front page chances are your site will get noticed and if the audience is right (yes yes, all those SB services have different audience and this is also something to look into!) more people will bookmark your site, resulting in still more people bookmarking your site, resulting – yes that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s right – in search engine-independent relevant traffic. This is just one example – or even a hint – of what can be done, and if you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re creative enough, you can work out many others – just remember about the interaction on my scheme and use it to your benefit exploring all the possible combinations. Tags & Folksonomies – What are they, and why should you care?<\/a><\/p>\n Wink\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Michael Tanne Discusses the Future of Tagging<\/a><\/p>\n
\nSuggested reading:<\/p>\n