SEO Dance

So you write a great post, and someone diggs it. You decide to send a shout out to your digg friends asking for a digg for your story, hoping that you will move the coveted front page of Digg. Will your marketing effort land you on the front page and the massive amount of traffic that follows popular stories on Digg?

First of all, if you are banking on your friends’ diggs to help you out, then you need a lot of friends. Making the front page of Digg will take a lot of diggs. Here are some numbers from a week’s worth of Digg’s most popular stories with the first number representing the popular stories of the day and the second being the least amount of diggs for a story:

March 27 - 105 diggs, least digg - 240
March 26 - 78 -least diggs - 266
march 25 - 95 -least 332
March 24 - 71 - least 277
march 23 - 61 - least 350
march 22 -42 - least 302
march 21 - 76 least 263
March 20 - 89 least 204

So, just like in high school, there is a small percentage of stories that actually become popular on Digg. While a popular story will bring you a lot of traffic, it will take either a lot of work or sheer luck to have it make the popular list.

Are you twittering yet? I have been playing on Twitter for the past week and really see how this can be an effective promotional and, more importantly, networking tool.

Twitter is like any other social networking outlet. The more time you put into it, the better chance you have at reaping rewards. There are many folks who are using Twitter who have shared their thoughts and opinions:

Twitter vs Facebook Kinda (video post)

Reasons I’m not following you on Twitter

Twitter Guide Talking in < 140 spaces

There are plenty articles on Twitter as it seems bloggers are very fond of Twitter. And bloggers tend to blog what they know. If you’d like to follow me on Twitter, add me. I like to follow back.

Digg is a social media portal where users share stories from various websites. Of course, you probably already knew that, and there is no doubt that you know that Digg can drive a lot of traffic to websites. For a website to garner Digg traffic, it needs to be fairly popular on Digg. How do some stories seem to acquire so many diggs while other ones never seem to take off? Digg is basically a popularity contest, so to have a successful Digg story, you must first do some homework on the Digg community.

Digg has many rivals from websites like Bumpzee to even more specialized websites like Writersbase.com. It might be worth the trouble to check into other social media websites or it might be better just to full concentrate on Digg.

Just where to start with figuring out Digg? The key to Digg success is to use the service. Submit stories and add friends to your profile. When submitting a story, throw caution to good SEO writing and think more of a newspaper headline. The headline should be catchy and complete. It should be related to the story but not give too much away. You want to pique the interest of Digg users to click on it to learn more.

Before you begin submitting every story that you read, hang out on Digg for a few days to see the type of stories that become hugely popular. This will help you gage just what seems to make it in the Digg community. Instead of hanging out on Digg all day, configure a widget like the one below to keep an eye on the top stories of a certain category.

It is easy to get discouraged with Digg if you don’t build your network. Work on adding friends, digging good stories, and submitting popular content to help you get noticed. Sign up for the RSS feeds of popular blogs that have a lot of Digg submissions. That way you can hopefully be on top of the big news of the day and be able to digg it before someone else.

To be successful at Digg takes a lot of work but doesn’t it with everything? It’s best to evaluate the stories on Digg to see if your content will even be popular on the website before getting too involved. Digg can be a powerful resource for website traffic if it’’s done right.

Technorati can be a great tool to use for blog promotion. It’s simple to add tags to your blog. You can either check to see if your blog software supports tags, install a Wordpress plugin, like Simple Tags, or add tags manually to your post. Using Technorati tags will ensure that your blog post is filed and indexed with them. Not everyone is sold on the idea that Technorati is worth the extra work needed to tag their blogs. Deceth over at WebDevNotes talks about his feelings on the subject of using Technorati tags.

Tags can be thought of as categories. In fact, if you are not tagging your stories, your category might be used as your tag. This can be fine for some posts but if you have a “general” category or “MISC” then it really doesn’t tell what the post is about. Tags should be short and sweet, usually one word will do the trick. I like of tags to my stories this way. I think of the game show Password in the final round where the one teammate can only give one word clues to get their partner to say the phrase on the big money board. If I write a post about a subject, what words have I either used or what words would get person to think of this subject.

I believe Technorati is here to stay, or at least as long as blogging is around. So, using tags in your post could be a wise move to garner traffic and exposure through Technorati.

Technorati

It may have a crazy name, but the concept behind Thoof is not. Users of Thoof submit their favorite articles - much like in the same fashion as Digg and other similar websites. The difference with Thoof is that it gives each article submitted an equal shot at gaining in popularity. So many times with Digg if a story doesn’t receive a bunch of diggs then no one ever sees it. Thoof puts all stories on equal footing, which means more exposure to your articles and better quality news rises to the top.

Signing up is easy and adding a story is simple, too. Other users can add to the article description of stories. Each story must have two tags before it can be submitted. Thoof also remembers which stories you read and will display stories that it thinks might be of interest to you. It’s like TIVO but for the web.

Thoof could be a very useful tool in the social media circles since it has the same kind of style we are used to but with a slightly different twist on how it determines popularity.

Thoof

Have you ever stumbled upon a great web service that you quickly forgot about only to rediscover it later and wonder why you haven’t already signed up for it? This is my experience with BlogHer. I stumbled upon BlogHer a few months back while exploring their ad program but quickly forgot about it. Now I have rediscovered BlogHer and happy that I have.

BlogHer is a blogging social network for women. Sign up for a free account. In your profile list your blogs and gain more exposure for them as well as yourself through the network. You can get your blog added to the BlogHer list so that more BlogHer users can find your blog.

Self promotion is so important when blogging especially when you first get started. You have to get the word out about your blog in as many different venues as possible. BlogHer is a great network for women bloggers who blog on a topic typically enjoyed by women. Getting the word out about your blog in the right circles will help to increase exposure and traffic for your blog. Plus it can be a great way to network with bloggers - who not only enjoy blogging but reading blogs as well.

BlogHer

If you’re looking for something innovative and sparkly, Go Web 2.0 directory might be of help. Go Web 2.0 is a visual directory and a web 2.0 product on its own.

Brian Clark of the great Copyblogger has shared wisdom on five link building strategies that work.

Aside from the age-old tactic of using article directories, embracing the social media through networking emails and using social network sites and making guest appearances, one way to help the link popularity of your site grow that Brian has highlighted is to simply link out.

Linking out or mentioning links on your blog posts is what I’ve also witnessed to be a subtle way of asking for a link exchange. Sure, getting a link back may not be the usual reason why one would send link love to a person. But a link that’s reciprocated is usually appreciated.

link popularity, link building strategy, copyblogger

There was a MyBlogLog sold to Yahoo! rumor last November. Now it’s official - Yahoo! bought MyBlogLog at $10 million according to sources.

MyBlogLog is a social network offering a blog tool that allows one check blog stats and gives faces to blog visitors who signed up this service.

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Guy Kawasaki, who’s mantra is to “empower entrepreneurs”, included improving your Google PageRank as one of the ways on how to use LinkedIn. LinkedIn, dubbed as MySpace for adults, is what I consider as one of the most popular method to control one’s online identity. How? Sign up and create your LinkedIn profile and wait a few weeks and then search for your name and you will know.

I think this is the very reason why Guy finds LinkedIn helpful in improving one’s pagerank. However, I think he means one’s Google search engine results pages visibility. PageRank is different from SERPs placement since one does not have to have a high pagerank to gain better search engine placement.

See how he puts it:

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I was about to recommend Darren Rowse’s post on making Digg work for your blog but decided to not give it a go. Why? Read on…

Does the acronym SEO makes you want to roll your eyeballs because you equate SEO with spam? Spam, for the uninitiated, is that anything annoyingly repeated just to get the same message across and it’s usually for advertising purposes.

Then, you’ll do good as a Digg editor because… (more…)

Tagometer, a new widget from Del.icio.us , has been released to further boost the ego of bloggers with the most of bookmarked posts.

The Tagometer opens things up from there - using a JSON data feed from del.icio.us, the Tagometer includes an up-to-date count of others who’ve already bookmarked the page, as well as a fresh list of the top tags applied.

It has two kinds: the one-line badge and the tall badge. See samples of these Tagometer varieties and how to get one.

via Yahoo! Search Blog

del.icio.us, social bookmark, Tagometer, widget, tagging

At least according to David Temple, because he has another view of who should really be noted as the Person of the Year..

I’ll tell you which of you is the person of the year. While you are cryin’ because your YouTube wasn’t dugg, or your linkbait didn’t work, or wondering whether Britney was wearing underwear or not, American men and women are fighting a war!

Too much for imagining people taking a stand ovation for you after reading that Time’s linkbait, huh?

But if you have been one netizen who generate content for the Internet for the good of the afflicted, then, yeah, you’re right YOU really are worthy of being labeled as the Person of the Year.

person of the year, NY Times, David Temple, social media