Sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, and Reddit can be highly effective properties to build links to your pages on. Building a link campaign centered around social media sites such as these can work wonders for you, and becoming popular in these communities can unleash a flood of traffic and backlinks upon you.
Although these sites can bring in a large amount of traffic, it is generally low revenue traffic for the publisher. The real strategy here is to rake in the additional backlinks that result from the popular interest in what you have posted. As an example, look at any story which has made the Digg homepage. A front page placement on Digg can result in tens of thousands of viewers, and hundreds of additional backlinks. While the viewers may come and go, those links are left behind feeding your site’s strength within the engines.
While acting out your social media strategies, you may want to keep these “best practices” in mind.
1. Work with the community. The key to social media sites is the “social” nature of their traffic. Offending or irritating the site’s community can quickly lead to being called out, or exposed and ridiculed by the readers. your success depends on the response of these readers, so work with them in your posting, give them what they want and be a positive contributor to the community as a whole. Work towards having built a solid reputation amongst your peers on the site.
2. While writing articles for social news sites like Reddit, Digg, or Propeller, stick to the topics that relate to your business. You may find that your articles catch on and rise in rank quite quickly for your targeted keywords. The relevance of your inbound links will be higher than those made in an unrelated post.
Be sure to use your competitive keywords in both the title of the article itself, and the title of the submission on the social site. These are generally the most common elements used as anchor text when people link into your posts and articles.
3. Delicious and StumbleUpon are structured ina way quite different from other social news sites. Delicious is a social bookmarking service, in which users “tag” pages on the web which they wish to return to easily at a later date. StumbeUpon is similar with some added content discovery options. Both sites have an option for viewing popular pages in the system, leading users to content on hot trending topics.
Users coming to your site via a tagging or bookmarking site tend to hold a general interest in your topic. So as opposed to someone who may have found your page via a catchy headline on a social news site, these users are generally more targeted towards your business market. So the traffic might not be as big, but the quality is much better, which also leads to lots of opportunities for users to link back to your content. These sites are best used in an attempt to reach major influences in your market space, and can lead to some high quality backlinks of significant power.
