With the increase of awareness of webmasters in the value of a link (usually the overinflated value), is getting harder and harder to find valuable external links and especially one way.

One easy solution for that is the use of social bookmarking sites. Opinions vary on this matter but if is not going to harm you why not use it.

Social bookmarking websites have the following qualities:

• Provide a one way link to your website
• They place your link in themed paged (based on the tags you use)
• Increase your visibility

To help take advantage of this there are 2 approaches:

Passive: In your pages (on regular websites) or on your blog posts, place tools that help your visitors bookmark it on their favorite social bookmarking service. Most of the webmasters go this way but they usually place only 1-3 bookmarking links missing a great part of the advantage. Barry from SEO Roundtable recommends another approach by using a single bookmarking link from Socializer. This one currently covers 20 social bookmarking sites.

Active: You can wait for your visitors to bookmark you or you can step forward by being proactive and do it yourself. This will increase your chances for traffic. To facilitate this I recommend Only Wire that allows simultaneous bookmarking in 17 social bookmarking websites. If you want a complete job you can check a more detailed list of social bookmarking sites.

Conclusion:
To gather the best results using the passive/active approach seems the optimum solution. If you want to stay in the white/gray area of SEO use carefully the active approach. On some of the SB sites any tentative of spamming will end in a termination of the account or a permanent ban on your IP.