Digging For Link Bait With Social Bookmarks

The Digg Effect and Linkbait are two of the most commonly heard buzzwords in search engine optimization, and for good reason. They provide a link building strategy that is encouraged and endorsed by Google and can create hundreds of natural links in less time than it previously took to build a dozen links using the old and increasingly useless reciprocal link trading methods. The way [tag]Digg[/tag] works is still a mystery to so many people doing business online. So here are some of the the secrets to successfully building links to your site via the power of Digg.

Digg is a Link Building Tool, not a Traffic Generating Tool

The whole point of getting listed on Digg is to expose your content to as many people as possible in the hope that many of them will link to you. Getting on the front page of Digg will send you a huge surge of traffic, often thousands of people within the first few hours of your page reaching Digg's frontpage. But, that traffic surge will be super short-lived and few of those people will return to your site again.

So forget about selling them anything. Instead, you're operating on the principle that the more people who see your site, the more likely it is that some will link to you. If 10,000 people visit your site and you have content that they find highly interesting, it's not uncommon for 100 of those people to link to you. And that folks is 100 natural links that you didn't have to ask for. All you did was create the content and expose it to a huge group of people and some of them liked it enough to link to your site. These are exactly the types of links that Google responds favorably to when ranking pages in the search results.

If marketing your sites with the Social Networks ether through Digg or other sites like StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Reddit, or Netscape your remember that it's primarily about exposing your content to as wide an audience as possible and getting them to link to you. It may be ego boosting to see your traffic stats go through the roof for a day or two, but if none of those people link to you then you haven't accomplished anything beyond increased bandwidth charges.