How Useful are Automated Social Bookmarking Tools?

If you’re looking for a tool to promote your website(s), the buck stops with social bookmarking. With the advent of Web 2.0 and its focus on the social aspect of the Internet, listing your pages on bookmarking sites is a surefire way to get visitors to your pages – they either get there by directly clicking on your link, or if your page is ranked highly enough, it turns up on a Google search depending on how trusted your site is.

Since it’s tedious and time consuming to manually add bookmarks to various bookmarking sites, most people turn to automated software that is able to do this for them. While there are many options available, some free and others at a cost, the thing to remember when choosing automated social bookmarking software is to make sure your site is not blacklisted as spam.

Automated software that creates a large number of profiles and continually posts all your pages to every social bookmarking site there is, runs the risk of getting your site(s) labeled as spam. You also abuse your Internet Service Provider by running this tool continuously and risk cancellation of your service. And finally, the bookmarking sites you post to will end up blocking you and putting an end to your posting days.

The key to selecting a good social bookmarking tool is to look for one that does not send out your bookmarks on a continuous basis, but which posts tags gradually and once every few days. You must be able to set the time frame for the posting. You must also look for software that is server based and does not run on your PC. It’s more complicated to install but the difficulty is worth it when you consider the savings on your resources.

The bookmarking tool you use must randomly select tags and bookmarking sites so that the posting process looks like it’s been done by human beings and not a machine. Some tools even offer to post from proxy servers thus reducing the possibility of your sites being blacklisted and blocked as spam.

Automated social bookmarking tools are useful only when used judiciously – after all, there’s no use for a bookmarking strategy or tool when your sites are all blocked out as spam.

This post was contributed by Heather Johnson, who writes on the subject of dial up Internet.   She invites your feedback at heatherjohnson2323 at gmail dot com.