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.