The SEO Galaxy

Pay attention to your Headlines

Many great articles go unnoticed on social bookmarking sites because their headline is not catchy enough. Your headline is the first (and very often the only) thing users will see from your article, so if you don’t make the effort to provide a catchy headline, your chances of getting to the front page are small.
Here are some examples to start with :-

Original headline : The Two Types of Cognition
Modified Headline : Learn to Understand Your Own Intelligence

Original headline: Neat way to organize and find anything in your purse instantly!
Modified Headline : How to Instantly Find Anything in Your Purse

2Write a meaningful & short description

The headline is very important to draw attention but if you want to keep that attention, a meaningful description is vital. The description must be slightly provocative because this draws more attention but still, never use lies and false facts to provoke interest. For instance, if your write “This article will reveal to you the 10 sure ways to deal with stress once and forever and live like a king from now on.” visitors will hardly think that your story is true and facts-based.

You also might be tempted to use a long tell-it-all paragraph to describe your great masterpiece but have in mind that many users will not bother to read anything over 100-150 characters. Additionally, some of the social bookmarking sites limit descriptions, so you’d better think in advance how to describe your article as briefly as possible.

3Have a great first paragraph

This is a rule that is always true but for successful social bookmarking it is even more important. If you have successfully passed Level 1 (headlines) and Level 2 (description) in the Catch the User’s Attraction game, don’t let a bad first paragraph make them leave your site.

4Content is king

However, the first paragraph is not everything. Going further along the chain of drawing (and retaining) users’ attention, we reach the Content is King Level. If your articles are just trash, bookmarking them is useless. You might cheat users once but don’t count on repetitive visits. What is more, you can get your site banned from social bookmarking sites, when you persistently post junk.

5Make it easy for others to vote / bookmark your site

It is best when other people, not you, bookmark your site. Therefore, you must make your best to make it easier for them to do it. You can put a bookmarking button at the end of the article, so if users like your content, they can easily post it. If you are using a CMS, check if there is an extension that allows to add Digg, Del.icio.us, and other buttons but if you are using static HTML, you can always go to the social bookmarking site and copy the code that will add their button to your pages.

6Know when to submit

The time when you submit can be crucial for your attempts to get to the front page. On most social bookmarking sites you have only 24 hours to get to the front page and stay there. So, if you post when most users (and especially your supporters) are still sleeping, you are wasting valuable time. By the time they get up, you might have gone to the tenth page. You’d better try it for yourself and see if it works for you but generally posting earlier than 10 a.m. US Central Time is not good. Many people say that they get more traffic around 3 p.m. US Central Time. Also, workdays are generally better in terms of traffic but the downside is that you have more competitors for the front page than on weekends.

7Submit to the right category

Sometimes a site might not work for you because there is no right category for you. Or because you don’t submit to the right category – technology, health, whatever – but to categories like General, Miscellaneous, etc. where all unclassified stuff goes. And since these categories fill very fast, your chance to get noticed decreases.

8Build a top-profile

Not all users are equal on social bookmarking sites. If you are an old and respected user who has posted tons of interesting stuff, this increases the probability that what you submit will get noticed. Posting links to interesting articles on other sites is vital for building a top-profile. Additionally, it is suspicious, when your profile has links to only one site. Many social bookmarking sites frown when users submit their own content because this feels like self-promotion.

9Cooperate with other social bookmarkers

The Lonely Wolf is a suicidal strategy on sites like StubleUpon, Digg, Netscape. Many stories make it to the front page not only because they are great but because they are backed up by your network of friends. If in the first hours after your submittal you get at least 15 votes from your friends and supporters, it is more likely that other users will vote for you. 50 votes can get you to the top page of Digg.

10Submit in English

Linguistic diversity is great but the majority of users are from English-speaking countries and they don’t understand exotic languages. So, for most of the social bookmarking sites submitting anything in a language different from English is not recommendable. The languages that are at an especial disadvantage are Chinese, Arabic, Slavic languages and all the other that use non-latin alphabet. German, Spanish, French are more understandable but still they are not English. If you really must submit your story (i.e. because you need the backlink), include an English translation at least of the title. But the best way to proceed with non-English stories is to post them on where they belong.

11Never submit old news

Submitting old news will not help you in becoming a respected user. Yesterday’s news is history. But if you still need to submit old stuff, consider feature articles, howtos and similar pieces that are up-to-date for a long time.

12Check your facts

You must be flattered that users read your postings but you will hardly be flattered when users prove that you haven’t got the facts right. In addition to sarcastic comments, you might also receive negative votes for your story, so if you want to avoid this, check you facts - or your readers will do it.

13Check you spelling

Some sites do not allow to edit your posts later, so if you misspell the title, the URL, or a keyword, it will stay this way forever.

14Not all topics do well

But sometimes even great content and submitting to the right category do not push you to the top. One possible reason could be that your stories are about unpopular topics. Many sites have topics that their users love and topics that don’t sell that well. For instance, Apple sells well on Digg and The War in Iraq on Netscape. Negative stories - about George Bush, Microsoft, evil multinational companies, corruption and crime also have a chance to make it to the front page. You can’t know these things in advance but some research on how many stories tagged with keywords like yours have made the front page in the last year or so can give you a clue.

15Have Related Articles / Popular Articles

Traffic gurus joke that traffic from social bookmarking sites is like an invasion – the crowds pour in and in a day or two they are gone. Unfortunately this is true – after your listing rolls from the front page (provided that you reached the front page), the drop in traffic is considerable. Besides, many users come just following the link to your article, have a look at it and then they are gone. One of the ways to keep them longer on your site is to have links to Related Articles / Popular Articles or something similar that can draw their attention to other stuff on the site and make them read more than one article.

16RSS feeds, newsletter subscriptions, affiliate marketing

RSS feeds, newsletter subscriptions, affiliate marketing are all areas in which the traffic from social bookmarking sites can help you a lot. Many people who come to your site and like it, will subscribe to RSS feeds and/or your newsletter. So, you need to put these in visible places and then you will be astonished at the number of new subscriptions you got on the day when you were on the front page of a major social bookmarking site.

17Do not use automated submitters

After some time of active social bookmarking, you will discover that you are spending hours on end posting links. Yes, this is a lot of time and using automated submitters might look like the solution but it isn’t. Automated submitters often have malware in them or are used for stealing passwords, so unless you don’t care about the fate of your profile and don’t mind being banned, automated submitters are not the way to go.

18Respond to comments on your stories

Social bookmarking sites are not a newsgroup but interesting articles can trigger a pretty heated discussion with hundreds of comments. If your article gets comments, you must be proud. Always respond to commends on your stories and even better – post comments on other stories you find interesting. This is a way to make friends and to create a top-profile.

19Prepare your server for the expected traffic

This is hardly a point of minor importance but we take for granted that you are hosting your site on a reliable server that does not crash twice a day. But have in mind that your presence on the front page of a major social bookmarking site can drive you a lot traffic, which can cause your server to crash – literally!
I remember one of the times I was on the front page on Digg, I kept restarting Apache on my dedicated server because it was unable to cope with the massive traffic. I have many tools on my site and when the visitors tried them, this loaded the server additionally.
Well, for an articles site getting so much traffic is not so devastating but if you are hosting on a so-so server, you’d better migrate your site to a machine that can handle a lot of simultaneous hits. Also, check if your monthly traffic allowance is enough to handle 200-500,000 or even more visitors. It is very amateurish to attract a lot of visitors and not be able to serve them because your server crashed or you have exceeded your bandwidth!

20The snowball effect

But despite the differences in the likes of the different social bookmarking communities, there are striking similarities. You will soon discover that if a post is popular on one of the major sites, this usually drives it up on the other big and smaller sites. Usually it is Digg posts that become popular on StumbleUpon and Reddit but there are many other examples. To use this fact to your best advantage, you may want to concentrate your efforts on getting to the front page of the major players only and bet on the snowball effect to drive you to the top on other sites.
An additional benefit of the snowball effect is that if your posting is interesting and people start blogging about it, you can get tons of backlinks from their blogs. This happened to me and the result was that my PR jumped to 6 on the next update

1. Headlines - People may look at your article and ignore it, if your title is not catchy enough. Just have a look at articles which made to digg homepage and notice their titles. They are such topics which provokes the interest in viewer and compel them to click on it. The title is the offcourse the most important thing when it comes to social bookmarking websites. Here is a excellent article which should help you to frame better titles.

2. The Description - The description which you write must be a short one and should briefly describe the article maximum in a sentence or two. The description is something which also helps to provoke interest in the reader, but the important thing is that never use false facts to provoke interest. Moreover your description must be maximum 50 - 100 words and not more than that. Most people don’t afford to read more than that.

3. Content Is king ! - The first few sentences of the story or say the first paragraph descide whether the user is going to digg or stumble to story and read ahead or close the window. If you have successfully made good headlines and descriptions and make a bad writeup in the first paragraph, your efforts will go useless most of the time. The next thing is your rest of the article.

4. Use bookmarking buttons (must use) - Say a person clicks your link on digg and comes to your website. If he finds your story interesting and wants to digg it, he would less probably go back to digg just to digg it (Though some of them will do it). But to get maximum amount of diggs or stumbles, make sure you have added social bookmarking buttons in your article body. You can see this on my blog as well, I use diggIT plugin to add digg buttons near the first paragraph of my posts.

5. Strength of your profile - Most social bookmarking websites add more values to people who have strong profile. Their submissions and bookmarks are looked up more valuably. For example, if Kevin Rose or Muhammad Saleem diggs your story on digg.com, you will most probably get over many hundred diggs in the next few minutes. Same goes with stumbleupon, if a Powerful stumbleUpon user stumbled your webpage, you are going to get many hits instantly. The first reason for this is that stumbleupon gives more importance to stumbles made by people with strong profiles and the second thing is that, powerful profile pages get heavy traffic too, so a part of that traffic will get diverted to your website.

6. Time of submission - Its useless to submit a story when most of your friends and supporters are sleeping. By the time they wake up, your story would have been buried. It is usually good to submit a story when it is evening in the US, around 3 - 6 P.M. since most people are busy in office in day time and the rest are hooked to television for late night. Evening is seen to be the surfing time of majority of US population.

7. Don’t forget the word “Social” - Build a big network of fellow social bookmarkers. If you manage to get about to 20 - 30 diggs in the first 10 mins of your submissions, it is likely that your story will be noticed by a majority of people and they will also digg it and it will get the ball rolling to the front page. This applies only when your story is really worth front page. It doesn’t mean that you submit some spam and ask your friends to digg it. It will usually hurt your whole network’s reputation and most of the time, other fellow social bookmarkers will notice your gang and bury it. So its useless to submit spam to social bookmarking websites.

8. Check your story body, titles and descriptions for typos and grammatical mistakes.

9. Don’t submit too old news

10. Submit to the most relevant category.

Last but not the least, get a good hosting so that when digg sends killer traffic, your server is well able to cope up with it Nothing is worse that the situation when your story made to digg homepage and your bandwidth exceeded right at the moment (Believe me, it has happened many times in past)

10. Submit to the most relevant category.

Last but not the least, get a good hosting so that when digg sends killer traffic, your server is well able to cope up with it Nothing is worse tha

Today we are going to learn about getting traffic from Stumbleupon, this strategy has been tried many times and it works for sure. You can also try it, So lets start off !

Channel-surfing the internet

We’ve all flicked through TV channels back and forth, waiting for something to hold our attention. The decision to stay on a channel or surf elsewhere is usually made in a second or two, and the principle is the same for StumbleUpon users.

With so many other potentially great sites available to them at the click of a mouse, you need to make it immediately clear why your site is worth their time. Here are some tips to help you do just that.

1. Make your blog’s core mission-statement unmissable

A core mission-statement as I define it is a one or two sentence description encapsulating what your blog has to offer. A good core mission-statement describes the kind of content you provide and broadly what your blog is about. It should communicate a lot of information in only a few words.

If a stumbler can see straight away your blog is about something they’re interested in then they’re likely to stick around.

2. Insert powerful visual cues

When channel-surfing the decision to stick with a channel or move on is often largely determined by visual cues. Even with the sound off you can tell a drama from a news program, a travel show from a cartoon, because visual elements provide clues as to what kind of show you’re watching.

The same principle applies to blogs. If your blog’s header contains an image of a pile of cash, we can reasonably assume the blog is about money (or making it). That’s a lot of information communicated instantly by a single image.

3. Push your content above the fold

StumbleUpon users often judge a site by what is offered in the above the fold area — the area of your site which appears on screen before any scrolling occurs.

I think this blog is an example of how to do that well. Not only do headlines and the first few paragraphs of a post appear above the fold, but other content of interest is showcased in the header area. StumbleUpon users immediately see a site packed with value.

You can use the top part of your blog’s sidebar, its header area and the post area to showcase your content. In doing so, you’ll straight away show StumbleUpon visitors why they should stick around.

4. Be unique, be pretty

While it’s difficult to judge the quality of a blog’s content in just a few seconds, people are much more hasty with aesthetic judgments. A gorgeous or interesting blog design encourages a stumbler to stick around and see whether the content is great too.

Of course, a great design is a lot of work (or quite a bit of money). The next-best thing is a unique logo or header image, an interesting color scheme, and so on. There are a number of small changes you can make to create a blog that looks unique and sets you apart from the crowd.

StumbleUpon is a new free service where internet surfers can discovers new website according to their interest. StumbleUpon lets you “channelsurf” the best-reviewed sites on the web. This helps you find interesting webpages you wouldn’t think to search for. For webmaster, Stumbleupon is another great way to get traffic to their site which might bring more subscribers and sells.

Bringing a huge traffic to your site from StumbleUpon is achieavable if you follow these 10 steps. Stumblers are often tend to got a Digg and other social-bookmarking sites so never not underestimate the traffic that you got from them. Just make sure that you sign up and submit your website there first. Now here are the tips.

1) Tag your site to the related category so that the visitor can expect what they will find in your website. Build a good, unique, and informative content.

2) Use an eye-catching headline like “secret” or “shock”. The visitor will curious to know what is inside your website.

3) Put the StumbleUpon integration code to every page in your site but do not stumble all your pages by yourself.

4) Be a part of the stumble community so that you will know what they are mostly interested with.

5) Prepare your site with “viral marketing technique” so that the number of traffic will double from the Stumblers. (free e-book or flash game giveaway)

6) Ask your friend to “thumbs up” your site and you did the same to his/her website.

7) Suggest your reader to try StumbleUpon and install the toolbar to increase the number of your pages got “thumbs up”.

Add as many “StumbleUpon” friends as possible (the result is same as above).

9) If you got many websites, link them together. If one of your website got stumbled well, the other site might receive the effect too.

10) Optimize your website loading time. If can, avoid flash since not all browser can support the latest flash version.

We all need traffic, Don’t we ?

So here is a great find to get Traffic from Commenting on Digg.com

Read these tips carefully

1. First, your links must post to quality content. The three articles I linked to above are well-written, well-researched articles. Two of the three articles that I linked to have even been featured on Slashdot (1, 2). Quality, of course, is a relative term. Given the typical Digg banter, the threshold for adding quality content can sometimes quite low. The links, however, cannot point to pages that are clearly blogspam or you are sure to face Digg’s wrath.
2. Must be on topic. This is probably more important than the quality of the link. It may seem obvious, but if your comment/link doesn’t relate to the article, especially if it contains a link, then it will be buried.
3. First posts comments are going to receive exponentially more traffic than later posts. They can set the tone for the rest of the discussion and can be almost as important as the actual article being linked to. If the Digg article already has a comment then it is usually better to reply to the first comment than submit a new comment. This is true even if your comment isn’t a direct response to the comment you are replying to. Otherwise, the first comment will eventually get dozens of replies, pushing the second comment way down the page where it will not be seen by most. For example, I replied to the first comment on a post about Google searches. The first post was buried with 16 negative votes which effectively gave me the first post. This comment brought 509 visitors. In my opinion, this is a flaw with the Digg comment system where you can only reply to root comments. It provides an incentive for disjointed discussions. I suspect that Digg will redo their comment system at some point in the near future.
4. If you are looking for traffic from your posts, it does little good to comment on articles that are already on Digg’s front page. There are two reasons for this. First, you no longer have the first post advantage and your comment will be lost among the masses. The second reason is that the highest amount of traffic will come while the post is at the top of main page. Each minute that passes is lost traffic. It’s much better to find future front page stories from the upcoming stories section. This is not hard. Checking the “hot in technology” on the right side of the page will show you which posts are most likely to hit the front page in the next few hours. Of course, you can drill down to other topics besides technology as well. The cloud view and other tools can also be used to predict which stories are most likely to hit the front page.
5. As with all forums and websites, if you focus solely on promoting your website it will eventually come back to haunt you. All your links and submitted stories should not be to your own sites.
6. Digg, as a general rule, has a negative bias towards all things SEO and marketing. If you have a name like SEOmoz (sorry), there are some people that aren’t going to give you a fair shake.
7. Digg does not use the NoFollow tag. However, if you receive a ‘thumbs down’ from four users your comment will be hidden by default. At some point in the future Digg may follow Wikipedia’s lead and move to NoFollow tags. I’d recommend it to prevent link spam but generally the community is quick to bury.
8. Realize that although you may receive many new visitors they may be less likely to stay around than traffic you receive from other sources. As you can see from the statistics below, the bounce rate was between 74-92%. The average time on site was 20 seconds for the Mythbusters article and just over a minute for the fuel and gas articles. I’m sure that there are ways the site can improve its stickiness (any ideas?), but the point remains the same—Digg visitors are less likely to stick around than traffic from other sources.

By way of full disclosure, the site I linked to, OmniNerd, is not my site. I have no financial relationship with the site and don’t know how their GoogleAds performed, but I suspect that very few visitors from Digg clicked on ads. If AdSense earnings are your primary motivation, Digg is probably not your best option.

Although this is not my site, OmniNerd did let me peek into their Google Analytics for this story. Since the stats used above are from Google Analytics and not the server logs, the actual traffic may be higher than I reported. According to something I read on StumbleUpon, “A large portion of…Firefox users have added the NoScript add-on to their browser. This is one of the top-10 most popular extensions for Firefox. This extension blocks any javascript calls…caus[ing]…Google Analytics…to not work.” If that’s true, then the actual traffic from these comments could be higher than recorded. Currently about 50% of OmniNerd’s recorded visitors use Firefox. How many are not being counted? Does anyone have experience with Google Analytics not counting all their traffic?

Although Digg comments can be a valuable source of traffic, the reaction to spam can be painful. A couple months ago Chandler Kent learned that the hard way when he submitted a comment with a link to his blog under his name, as is common practice in most forums. It quickly received hundreds of “thumbs down” but didn’t stop there. Someone posted his phone number and he began to receive creepy phone calls and comments such as he “deserves to be hunted down and stalked.” Ironically, his recounting of the fallout was widely publicized as “The Most Hated Comment on Digg” and brought him a ton of traffic.

Comments on Digg can bring you some nice traffic if you are willing to risk your life.