Gary Eckstein recently posted on Social Media Today about the value that social bookmarking can provide to website owners. They look at sharing services, like Digg, which allows viewers to vote on what they found interesting. Bookmarking services allow bookmarking of individual web pages, but a web based bookmarking program allows anyone to access the bookmarks across the web.

Eckstein offers these advantages to these two services:

1. Links: Every time someone shares or bookmarks a web page an additional link to the shared/bookmarked page is created. These links are indexed by the search engines (e.g. Google and Yahoo). It is common knowledge that search ranking is weighted heavily by the number of links to every web page i.e. the more links the more ‘important’ the search engines deem the page.

2. Expanded Audience: Sharing and bookmarking services (especially sharing services) list the pages submitted to the services. Anyone visiting and searching the sharing (or bookmarking) service may be presented with a link to the original content. This translates into a greatly expanded potential audience.

Do you frequently participate in a social bookmarking service? Have you seen it increase the amount of traffic you have visiting your website?