Social bookmarking sites these days are powerful marketing tools that SEO content creators can use to drive traffic to their blogs and niche sites. Traffic from social bookmarking sites is a great boost in addition to receiving traffic organically from search engines. If you’ve been in the SEO game for a while now, you probably know that every blogger has their favorite list of social bookmarking sites they think are the best, hands down. You probably even have your own list, but it seems as though everyone has different opinions when it comes to the best social bookmarking sites for driving traffic to your content. Knowing what social bookmarking sites have the potential to drive the most traffic your way is important because bookmarking your content takes up a good amount of your valuable time, even if you minimize this task with automated submitters.
The relevant stats of a social bookmarking site that make for the best possible link back to your content include; Google PageRank, number of inbound links, Alexa Rank and as far as eyeballs looking at your content, you’ll want to concern yourself with the stats on monthly visitors too. Given these criteria, here are the top 5 social bookmarking sites that can get the most visitors in front of your SEO content:
1. Digg
Google PR: 8, Alexa Rank: 284, Inbound links: 267,000,000 and monthly visitors according to Quantcast: 23,900,000.
We all know about Digg – the power of this bookmarking site is truly crazy. Get your content on the first page of Digg and you better hope your servers can handle the tens of thousands of visitors that will be headed your over to your site. The much harder part is getting your content to take off on Digg.
What does well on Digg? Apple related stories, useful tech news, negative stories about corporate corruption, news stories about odd and outlandish crimes, political opinion pieces that are not run of the mill and anything that is simply very quirky, funny or out of the ordinary.
2. Technorati
Google PR: 8, Alexa Rank: 457, Inbound links: 43,000,000 and monthly visitors according to Quantcast: 2,400,000.
Technorati is great because you can actually link you blog up to Technorati, which provides a stream of the latest and greatest in the blogosphere. Get you blog connected with Technorati and all your posts have a chance to be featured on a very high ranked social bookmarking site.
What does well on Technorati? A variety of blogs can do well on Technorati, but how much your content is featured depends on your “Technorati Authority” to a degree, which you must build up over time using their system of guidelines.
3. Del.icio.us
Google PR: 8, Alexa Rank: 2,648, Inbound links: 154,000 and monthly visitors according to Quantcast: 325,000
Another, great highly ranked social bookmarking site that has seen a lot of improvements and grown significantly in the last few years.
What does well on Del.icio.us? According to some analytical reviews, about 50 percent of Del.icio.us top ranking stories are about anything tech, 8 percent are about business and making money; 8 percent are tutorials of some sort or how-tos and 7 percent are simply offbeat, lifestyle stories. The rest are broken down into much smaller, various categories.
4. StumbleUpon
Google PR: 8, Alexa Rank: 939, Inbound links: 119,000,000 and monthly visitors according to Quantcast: 978,000
StumbleUpon is another great social bookmarking site – just use it yourself and you’ll soon find how addicting “stumbling” can be. You can “stumble” or bookmark your own content and review it yourself to get more hits from StumbleUpon. However, only “stumble” your best, most original content, as “stumbling” too much content that sounds the same or like it’s trying to sell something, will cause you to get kicked out from bookmarking content on this site.
What does well on StumbleUpon? This site is really the most diverse content wise; all sorts of topics can do well here. However, the top categories of topics are technology and off beat.
5. Reddit
Google PR: 8, Alexa Rank: 4,815, Inbound links: 3,807,418 and monthly visitors according to Quantcast: 1,200,000
Reddit has millions of loyal, tech loving, quirky users. Just post an interesting enough question in the AskReddit forum, and you could find your question and its comments on the first page of Reddit’s “what’s hot” section.
What does well on Reddit? Politics, news, science and programming.
Remember getting huge amounts of traffic from these bookmarking sites or any bookmarking site for that matter, means getting on the front page. This involves writing on certain, popular topics, but mainly creating stellar content that people just have to click on and share.
Jessica Drew is a freelance, SEO content writer who blogs about a variety of money making and finance topics such as private student loans.
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{ 101 comments }
thanks for the article..I am going to sign up on those sites right now..
Me too! This is a really helpful list. I have accounts with about half of these, but not all of them.
Ian these all are top ones and I am surprised to see that you do not have accounts on them.
Capitalise them my friend …
I have good time with stumble upon, Redditt never brought me any good traffic, Digg is cool and Technorati help me build my authority in my initial days.
So that means you use all of them almost.
You can also think about them like as link building for your mini or niche based blog.
Social Bookmarking do wonder for the low competitive keywords.
Yeah, I know ZK! I got some work to do. The ones I’m not currently on are Reddit and Technorati… Will add it to my list.
Have you think about hiring any one for your all social bookmarking submission ?
Ian is the PPC guy, so social media of this type is probably secondary.
Social Bookmarking is very much affordable can start only with $1.50 and you can get the social media presence on all top social bookmarking websites such as Digg, Delicious, Stumbleupon and all.
This is quite useful when you are doing for micro niche based website or amazon products based website.
In nutshell only $1.50 and you got the social media attention.
Yes, these are top ones, but they hardly send any traffic if you are not in top 2 pages.
But quite useful as SERP Boost for low competitive keywords … believe us.
or you are just saying it for the sake of some comment on the post.
That’s what 90% of the comments here are. They’re all racing to be number 1 on the Top Commentators.
They have always been great traffic for me!
What would be your strategy for getting a post to the top of Digg? Can you buy Diggs?
You can buy Diggs, there are several websites out there that allow you to do this, MicroWorkers is probably the best place I know, I never bought any Diggs though, nor have I ever been to the front page, good luck though.
Wow, that’s an interesting concept – buying Diggs. Thanks for sharing. I did not realize one could do that.
You can also buy facebook fans and and twitter tweets, so why not?
Twitter followers, I meant.
They are not of much use.
Buying Diggs, Buying Followers, Buying Google +1 .. these all are latest services for SEO benefit.
Google +1is hot cake at the moment.
thanks for the info mate, i will look in to it to buy some diggs
Just create amazing diggs and get people to trust you!
Or expand your social media network.
I know many people who have 200+ people media network and they help each other … simply awesome.
Not a good idea. If you are active on digg, you can easily bring your post on top.
Active in the sense what i got to do to get diggs..
@Arun Thanks for a post Idea
I do not think so … that being active will be good enough to arrive at first page.
As far as I know in the initial stage you need to adopt all kind of tricks to get at the no one spot unless and until you got the breaking news which other does not have …
Agree..!!!
More then that, become a trusted source!
You are talking like as Big “G”
Buying diggs is against TOS, but who will know about paid diggs?
HAHAHA
You may see many people are selling services like of Google +1 or Facebook Fans …
Buying links is also against BIG G’s TOS but its going on very strong … thanks to Google policy more links more good SERP
I would shy away from buying Diggs. Certainly, it would give you an initial traffic boost and you probably would not get caught/penalized for violating the TOS … but if you buy Diggs and readers could care less about your story/content most are still not going to click on the link from Digg.
It seems to me it would end up being a waste of money since you’d be generating artificial interest in your content/blog. I would think that the money you could spend on buying Diggs, would be better invested in the form of your time and coming up with and researching more interesting/news breaking stories of the type that generally perform well on Digg.
Just my 2 cents though – I have never bought Diggs – and do not know if the initial traffic boost generated from purchased Diggs is really worth the cost??
Those are the leaders Jessica, I would never skid submitting my content to any of those, but I also try and find smaller ones that are more focused to my nice, like Money Making, or Sports, or Blogging, there are tons of smaller ones that work pretty good too since they are specific to your nice. Try a Google search for “Your Niche” Social Bookmarking, and you should find at least a few.
Does submitting alone is enough how to go viral with your content.
Completely agree! Any good niche social bookmarking site that is highly relevant to your content can send you lots of traffic since niche social bookmarking users already have a keen interest in the topic at hand!
Nice!
I will soon send you John a guest post about SEO. I write useful articles about SEO on my blog too… like how to get 5.8 million backlinks in less than 3 minutes.
So beware for that
)
read your article it is interesting way of getting backlinks, are all those PR 9 links do follow..
Wow! Mate, looking forward to the guest post. Sounds like a really interesting backlink strategy you have… Almost too good to be true!
Those links are nearly useless.
I tried it. Zero traffic increase, whereas one link on this site’s commentator list gets me actual readers.
Those certainly helps … and this work maximum for low competitive keywords … for that they work like boon.
Mate do not know about your contents but yes like your killer title.
I kinda wanna see that guest post as well. My big problem with that is Google seeing a ton of links and banning your site cause they think it’s not legit. Which they would.
Great choices you have here. This is very helpful for those who are interested in promoting their sites through social bookmarking.
Social Bookmarking is the base stage of every Seo strategy. Proper and manual social bookmarking is always have good impact.
I agree, specially when you have good content.
Hmmm, I’m really going to have to play with more of these. Lets try to shut down a server or two!
lol
I like that idea.
That’s a really good problem to have – more traffic than your server can handle!
I would love to have that problem!
You are in quite aggressive’mood ….
great post, i like techorati but i havent really used social bookmarking sites much to date.
Hire someone who can do manual and affordable social bookmarking for you.
Agreed those are some great bookmarking sites. I personally like Reddit.
I was submitting some of my sites to stumbleupon for a while and it is a great way to get traffic. I did find that the traffic had a pretty high bounce rate, but even if only some of it sticks then that’s great.
There are also ways to automate bookmarking as well. You can buy services on fiverr and other places that will bookmark your sites and there is software that will help as well.
If you want to get the maximum exposure than go for the manual social bookmarking instead of automate.
I am getting good traffic from these websites, but its hard to get traffic from digg, reddit, technorati, Del.icio.us
From 5 you mentioned that hard to get from the 3 …. Interesting.
Many webmaster also using these to get the backlinks as well.
Agreed!
Is it just me who thinks that there’s absolutely nothing new in this guest post? Oh well..
Social bookmarking sites have been there since a long time ago now and I’d be damn surprised if Chow’s reader don’t know them
Anyway, I would always want to say that the each bookmarking sites has its own ‘niche’. For instance, reddit is more for humour while Digg is for technology. So its important to submit your content accordingly and not just submitting it everytime on all those sites.
Yes Melvin quite agree with you. But everyday thousands of new bie are joining this industry so for them this will be quite useful …
The first three sites are on a declining trend according to Google Trends, while the last two seems to be getting more popular these days. It’s good to know which ones are trending upwards.
Digg have made various changes in its platform and also the way they handles posts. But however now they are not so effective as they used to be before two year.
Digg is the best traffic source but the problem is that bringing our content to the first page. Its too tough. I know some people with blogs form a group and they digg every post of the group to manipulate Digg to promote their content on Digg.
Many webmaster buy digg votes as well and like facebook likes there are digg votes sellers as well …
Digg,Reddit and stumble upon are best source am using for my blog
I have to try it out reddit and stumple upon. Thanks a lot for given great post on here
I’d be recommending StumbleUpon because that’s the social networking site that has higher chances of giving traffic to non-Techy/Offbeat/Political blogs. Not really much to go to these days unless you stay in those places all day and hope for users to notice you
Yes if you are active at there than only you will be able to get the good results otherwise getting traffic from these sites are quite tough now ….
Technorati are difficult for me. I didn’t get a single traffic from Technorati.
Very interesting, its always hard to drive traffic to your site without paying but these are really good solid options, I’m having a look at them.
You do not have to pay but you need to invest very good amount of time at there to get the results.
But the quality of the traffic is not so good
Thanks for the bookmark site list.
those are now should be called CLASSIC tools to get traffic to your blog.
Facebook is the top and has the capability to drive the most traffic!
Hey thanks for the list of social bookmark service. Very usefull for me. Are they still good for SEO?
I’ve always found reddit a good source of traffic
I am right now using stumbleupon and digg to submit my post and stories and i am quite happy with the traffic coming from these two sites. After this write-up i would like to add my links on technorati too. Thanks for this guidance
Your entire list is out of order… Digg is mostly dead and should probably be at the bottom of any list in relation to traffic. StumbleUpon should be top and yep Technorati is still good (I write for Technorati)
Thanks for the info Benjamin. I did not realize you could do so well with StumbleUpon and Technorati. Will definitely check them out.
Very good post guest blogger. It is true that these sites are great to drive traffic to blogs and such, it’s also true that certain types of content do better on certain sites, and so on. I think the secret is find out where most of your audience hangs out, and then make it easy for them to share your content on those sites! Thanks for posting!
Nice read..
Thanks for the great share. All great places to get traffic! Just have to have a little bit of a rep!
Thanks this is great list ..
Recently I heard a lot of good things about stumbleupon, I had thought that Facebook took a lot of their pie..
It’s too bad your great advice are not all suitable for france. We’re so late !
Thanks for the info. Theses are some great tools for building my blog. I will look into these sites.
thanks for sharing this post, this are the type of post i am being looking for to assist or educate me on how to use social bookmark site.
one thing i don’t understand about social bookmark site is, if i don’t have followers yet, how do i use social bookmark to drive traffic to my blog site?
Hi,
My blog is in Portuguese.
Will these Social Bookmarking Sites be helpful for my blog?
Social Bookmarking is one of the good way to promote your blog or website. so it is applicable for any site apart from adult sites.
Digg is the best social bookmarking sites to drive more traffic
Apart from free traffic, i used them for good quality inbound link. But now, most of the social book marking sites are no-follow.
Thanks for the great article. Its good for a newbiee like me
Del.icio.us worked best for me. It certainly required building a community around it, but once people start browsing what you have bookmarked they really spend a long time checking out the links. Also, I found it a very good indirect tool for researching the competition.
Hi John, I am just wondering does traffics received from Social Bookmarking will only get us lower revenue per click on Adsense?
I am the 100th commentator to this post!
Hello Mr. John, you must gift me something
The digg.com is really good. But why delicious is given more importance in many advertising marketplaces?
Its a great list, and probably best 5 too.