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Connecting with long lost friends and meeting some new ones along the way are the greatest advantages of social networking sites. These websites serve numerous purposes and combine a plethora of communications functions. Email, instant messaging, message boards, discussion groups and file sharing capabilities reflect the extent to which social networking sites connect us through the Internet.

When one thinks of social networking, MySpace usually comes to mind. 6StarReviews.com reports that MySpace allows users to create profiles, friends lists and post bulletins to their friends or communities with the click of a button. MySpace also boasts professor ratings and college and high school community groups for anyone looking for those with common interests.

Facebook, another popular social networking site, began as a Harvard phenomena and eventually opened its doors to most every college, high school and eventually user imaginable. Facebook popularized ‘the wall,’ where friends can post messages to each other via their profiles.

It is no secret that the social networking craze has opened doors for many business prospects, as well. Many college students can join industry-related groups and meet new contacts through websites like Bebo and MySpace. Politicians have also jumped on the bandwagon, adding a vast online demographic to their campaign trail targeting.

Who wouldn’t feel special having Hillary Clinton on their friends’ list? Nielsen/NetRatings found social networking sites grew about 47% last year, so evidently, these sites are breaking ground for more than one reason.

You have most probably seen them in a lot of the popular, youth-oriented websites today. They are a bunch of keywords bunched together in a box under the label of "tags." But what are tags, exactly? And what do they mean to a marketer who wishes to establish his presence in the World Wide Web.

In such a short time, tags have become the "cooler" alternative for information search on the internet. And in this business, knowing what is cool is tantamount to knowing what is hot, and knowing what is hot more or less will tell you where the most profitable market is.

Tags In A Nutshell

A lot of people confuse tags with keywords. This shouldn’t be the case. Keywords are the terms that people use to search for information using the many search engines in cyberspace. Tags, on the other hand, are the terms that webmasters and bloggers use to categorize their content, and the terms that more and more online users use to find relevant information.

The difference is clear: keywords are mined by search engines, tags are mined by real people.

What does this mean?

By capitalizing on the growing popularity of tags, you can ensure that your website will be able to derive a lot of back links and generate a lot of visitors, through methods that you YOURSELF can control. You’re no longer reliant on search engine algorithms. With tags, you can determine where to place your content, when to place your content, and how your content can be found.

Why Tags?

Exploiting tags will make your online enterprise even more profitable. It’s like harvesting the benefits from a source that will eventually be as powerful as the search engines. In a way, tags are already more powerful than keywords.

A directory that is devoted to tags, like technorati.com , allows its members to categorize their new content under certain tags. If you’d select a tag and enroll your newest content there, your URL will appear on the very top of the said page. What does this mean? You can go either of two ways:

1. Select a hot tag that fetches a lot of views, and constantly update your website. This way, your URL will always appear on the very top of the listing under the said tag.

2. Select an unpopular tag, one which is so unique that there are little or no entries under its listing. Then enroll your entries there. This way, your website will always appear at the top all the time. This is a great option for those really obscure niches.

Additionally, online users have the option of bookmarking a specific tag they want, as well as a website within the said tag. If your website will prove to be fantastic for people, they will bookmark your URL in their social bookmarking account. Now, the best thing about this is that people can share their bookmarking account with others. Hence, your URL will be distributed virally, and you will be surprised to generate a lot of traffic from unexpected sources.

Tags Make Great Research Tools

Perhaps you’re on the lookout for the hottest subjects to focus on. Tags have rendered other online market research options quite obsolete. You can immediately view the hottest tags on the main page of every social networking, social bookmarking, and tag directories in the World Wide Web. These tags are hot because they manage to fetch a lot of page views. Hence, such should give you an idea what people are really looking for.

Surely, the savvy internet marketer in you will find many more ways on how to truly capitalize on this novel and innovative channel.

Social bookmarking is a way for internet users to store, classify, share, and search Internet bookmarks. In 2005 and 2006, social bookmarking sites, such as del.icio.us, Diigo, Furl, Ma.gnolia, Netvouz, and StumbleUpon became popular. Sites like reddit, Digg, Newsvine, and the new Netscape portal apply social bookmarking to news items. IBM even announced plans to enter the social software market this year.

There are a variety of ways to use bookmarks to improve your overall site popularity. What I personally like about social bookmarks is that it’s easy to do and very similar to other optimization methods I use. The way it works is as follows: A user registers for a social bookmarking site. They can either drag a book mark icon onto their browser title bar or simply utilize book mark button on various web sites. Once they have registered for an account, they browse the internet. When the individual identifies a web page or piece of content they want to share with others, they bookmark it. Again, this can be done by clicking the book mark button on their own browser or, if the content offers a book mark option, clicking and posting. Once that content is book marked, the bookmark site keeps a record of the book mark and waits to see if others book mark the same content or website.

When others book mark or vote for the same content, that content increases in popularity and the social book marking site ranks it higher than other content on their site. Some of these book mark sites also let you see the bookmarks of others. That’s what makes it a “social” bookmark. Not only is the general web populace rating Internet content collectively, but they can also see what others are book marking. For example, you can search Donal Trump’s book marks using the Del.icio.us book mark tool.

What’s even better is that you can use a site like Social Poster (free) found at http://socialposter.com/generator.php to post multiple bookmarks from one location. You will need to register for each of these sites, but once you do the submission process is simple, allowing you to place book marks across multiple book marking sites quickly and easily.

After book marking your home page on each of these sites, consider book marking specific content of channel level pages of your site. Creating deep links into your site can enhance your overall Google rankings. And of course, make sure to use the proper link text in your site title and description.

One final word on social bookmarking. Now that you know how to bookmark your site, the next logical step is to make it easy for others to bookmark your site. To do this, simply add a Social Bookmark applet (free) to your site by visiting AddThis.com. They offer a small piece of JavaScript you can add to your site in the form of a button.

When users click on the Bookmark button, they can select their specific book marking tool and book mark your content. This makes the process of book marking simple and easy to do.

Times are changing in the internet marketing landscape.

Whereas before, online businessmen tried their best to keep abreast of the latest strategies that will help them place their websites in beneficial positions in relevant search engine results, nowadays, they are trying out some new tactics that are completely different from their predecessors.

The trend in this day and age, you see, is veering away from the rather mechanical operations of search engines, and leaning towards the more accurate and humanized features of user-driven indexing systems.

Did you get lost somewhere in that statement?

Such is but natural. You see, current trends are dealing with new technology and new approaches that a significant adjustment must be made in terms of the online marketer’s mindset as well as the skills required to make it big in these changing times.

The Death Of SEO

Search engine optimization, or SEO, has dominated the Internet marketing industry for many years. It has been said that 80% of the traffic that can be generated for our online business will come from the search engines. Hence, getting a good position in search engine results pages (SERPs) has become the Holy Grail for most online businessmen.

But search engines are not without faults.

Search engines rely on spiders-robotic little creatures-to crawl through each and every single page in the World Wide Web. Thereafter, these spiders will index the pages according to the algorithms prescribed by the search engines.

Everything is automated. It’s either black or white. There are no gray areas. Hence, it can’t be helped that some pages will be placed in categories different from what the publisher has intended.

Trend Towards User-Driven Indexing Systems

User-driven indexing systems, on the other hand, allow the users themselves to classify websites under appropriate tags. The application of human discernment makes this approach more reliable and more credible for many people. After all, human eyes saw those pages. And the human mind processed their content and indexed them appropriately.

Social bookmarking websites are the most popular kinds of user-driven indexing systems. There are a lot of these in existence today, and judging from their page ranks, they are widely visited pages. The most renowned of these social bookmarking websites are furl.com, technorati.com, del.icio.us, and feedmarker.com.

Social Bookmarking Websites Explained

What are social bookmarking websites, exactly? While viewing web pages on your browser, you may have noticed a feature that will allow you to save a particular URL under your "My Favorites" folder. Click on the "Add To Favorites" button and you’ll be able to save the URL on your hard drive. This process is called bookmarking. The saved URL is called a bookmark.

Social bookmarking websites work the same way. But instead of saving a URL on your hard drive, you’ll be able to save it on a web server, under an appropriate tag.

If you visit a dog grooming website, for example, and you liked it a lot, you can save the URL under the tag "dog" or "dog grooming" in the space provided by any social bookmarking website.

What makes social bookmarking websites stand out is that you can share your list of indexed sites with other people. They may be looking for information about dogs, and your list can help them out a lot.

Marketing Advantages Of Social Bookmarking Websites

This relatively new technology presents a lot of useful possibilities for an online businessman:

- Experts predict that social bookmarking will soon replace search engines as the information finding process of choice by most Internet users. The best way to capitalize on this emerging phenomenon is by starting to position your online business using its features as early as today.

- Social bookmarking can easily be manipulated. You can place your own websites in favorable positions without having to go through the whims of search engine algorithms.

- Tags are beginning to establish an interconnectivity that reaches many platforms and many channels. Social bookmarking websites can easily become the launch pad for your conquest of specific tags which are considered as the "keywords for the new millennium."

The new generation of internet marketing strategies starts with social bookmarking websites. Master this particular channel and you’re sure to garner an avalanche of traffic from sources which were once unknown.