digg

Search for the post you did on Digg and you would spend the rest of the day figuring out where the *@ll it went. End of the day you would assume that your post never got posted. Well, the fact is that your news or article did get posted. But Digg’s search engine was unable to relevantly sort it out. I am not the one to claim that Digg’s search was all screwed up. Daniel Burka of Digg recently accepted this fact. Read the full story

When many websites experience low page views during the summer, LA Times quietly achieved a massive traffic of 127 million page views during July. This is 7 million more than its May record and 66% growth from its previous year.

LA Times credits its success to its search engine optimization it carries out. Mentioning in its press release, “Latimes.com keeps getting better at SEO (search engine optimization), which means our stories are ranking higher in Google and other search engines.” The release also added, “We are also performing better on sites like Digg.com. All that adds up to more exposure and more readership than ever before.”

The huge traffic has also helped bring up some of its top categories like the “Breaking News” and “Multimedia” to the finals of Online Journalism Awards.

Some of the most read articles in July were the Jackson’s Obama comments which went unnoticed and the earthquake in the L.A area. In addition many blogs like Top of the Ticket and The Dish Rag have hugely contributed to the traffic on July.

While search engine optimization has become a mainstream practice for any website, Social Media Optimization is considered a fairly new and unknown optimization field. Social Media Optimization can help hugely in search engine rankings and has a wider scope for fetching traffic and quality external links.

Create Tagging Option

The basics for fetching SMO popularity is to add bookmark plugins on your website, blog or forum so that visitors can easily tag your article onto their favorite search engines. There are a dozen plugins available if you have created your site on WordPress, Blogspot or any familiar open source blog.

Create Opportunity to Link

The next important step is to create a platform which is interactive and interesting. A visitor should be impressed or drawn towards the page topic such that he or she wishes to bookmark the page. If your site is static and the content never changes for months, you should seriously consider an option to add a Blog to your website.

Promote Your Site Content

It is recommended to self promote your site during early stages. How are people going to know about your content unless your site ranks well for the specific keyword? Try promoting your site by submitting your feeds, pdf, videos and articles onto other related websites ultimately driving traffic back to your website.

Allow Syndication

Provide options for third-party websites to use your feeds. For this feature, you should have RSS feeds enabled on your website.

After working on tags, RSS feeds and external submissions check the number of bookmarks or tags for your website in popular social media websites like Technorati, Del.ici.ous and Digg. This can provide a clear picture on the popularity of your website on Social Media websites.

You can soon find the rankings increase when the tagging increases in these websites.