Is there SEO value in Social Bookmarking?

A social bookmarking site provides you with a tool you can use to create a bookmark (i.e. link) to all the web pages you're interested in. You can then share your bookmarks with other people.

For example, I store links to all my marketing articles on a social bookmarking site called Delicious. My Delicious page contains a huge list of online marketing articles, found on sites all over the Internet. It's a very useful resource for anyone looking for information, advice and tips about online marketing.

I recommend you visit my Delicious page, and bookmark it yourself. From an online marketing perspective, it's a goldmine of information. You can also get a feel for how I'm using it.

Where's the SEO value?

As you can see, I've linked to a lot of articles on my Delicious page. Maybe you even bookmarked it yourself, and plan to return and explore the various articles later. The question is, where is the SEO value for me personally? Or put another way, how can you make use of this system to push your own site further up Google's search engine result pages?

The answer is surprisingly simple. Here's the plan...

Sign up for your own Delicious page
Add your own bookmarks
Invite your friends and colleagues to add these same links to their own Delicious pages
Invite others to add one or more of your articles to their Delicious page
Link to your Delicious page from third party sites (e.g. articles, blogs, classified sites, forum signatures)
Encourage people to link to your Delicious page

Over time, your Delicious page will be found by more and more people. If it contains genuinely useful information, it may even build PageRank. That spreads a little link juice to all the pages you link to. In other words, your Delicious page can be part of an SEO virtuous circle.