Last Traffic Tuesday, we talked about blog commenting as a free, easy and dependable search engine optimization tactic to drive more traffic to your site that just takes only a small amount of regular time and effort to apply.

This week, we’ll explore the similar strategy of social bookmarking and how to use it to foster a marked increase in the traffic to your website.

Most likely, you have already used basic bookmarking on a particular webpage that interested you on your own computer, but social bookmarking sites allow you to not only save, organize, and manage pages, but to alert other users to content you deem to be worthwhile and interesting.

Major search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo take distinct notice of socially bookmarked content, which aid in getting your website indexed.

However, in order to make this a productive practice for search engine optimization, there are some guidelines to keep in mind.

There are excellent free and user friendly sites, many of which are geared towards business owners, that can help you build links and add content through both manual and automatic methods.

StumbleThis offers the options of creating special interest groups of users for sharing stories and voting on content and stories from your profile. Digg, Del.icio.us, and Reddit are also popular choices.

Bookmark the right content.

Rather than repeatedly applying it to your homepage, use it on articles and backlinks.

This will actually increase the page rank of the articles and serve your SEO campaign better by strengthening your backlinks and demonstrating your site’s value.

Don’t bookmark too often or it can actually wave a spam flag to search engine spiders.

It is recommended you do it a few times a week or whenever you add new content like an article, news item, video, or blog post.