Social bookmarking has become a true success story that combines the ability to collaborate online with the knowledge of millions and the social dimension of the ever changing Internet. The World Wide Web is far too large and vast to ever allow individuals to find everything they're looking for on their own. Along comes the search engine to help them.

However, as efficient as the search engines may be for finding something, they can often add hours on to the search process, especially if the correct keywords are not used in the search. Social bookmarking is so unique because it brings the human touch into the equation. They say the Internet has billions of websites. It also has billions of users and many of these users are sharing the sites they view with others. This is what social bookmarking is all about.

Have you ever found a joke or funny story online that you wanted to share with others but didn't feel like emailing it? Social bookmarking makes this possible. Say you read an interesting story about Brett Favre and you want to share it with your friends at work. If you're not a member of a social bookmarking site, the first thing you'll want to do is join one of the many available.

Once you've joined, you'll have a couple of buttons on your web browser. Go to your Brett Favre story and click on the designated button to share the link on the social bookmarking site. A tagging window will pop up with your link in it and space for you to put in some tags or keywords. Here's where the tricky and important part comes in. The tags are what are going to help your friends and others find your website quickly and easily.

You can put in one or several tags but make them consistent with and related to your story. If you used football as a tag for your Brett Favre story, it would be far too vast to get good results. By using words like Favre, Bret Favre or Favre and a significant word from the article, others wishing to read your story will be able to find it easily.

You may also add significant notes or annotations with your tags to make it even easier for your website to be found. Because articles are tagged or voted on at social bookmarking sites, viewers can easily see which articles are the most recent or most popular.

By tagging your bookmarks as you would for yourself, others will find it easy to find what they're looking for and in much less time than it would take with conventional search engines. As more sites are tagged, these generated tags are grouped together, making it easy for anyone on the web to find the websites. This is the beauty of social bookmarking, and what's made it such a success story for Internet users.