Continuing my series of posts about social bookmarking, here are my top tips for getting your pages ranked and driving traffic to your sites…

1. Titles - leading and relevant

Without doubt, the single most important factor in whether or not a link to your site is clicked on is the title. While titles of pages and articles are always important, that is never more true than when it comes to social bookmarking. On many sites a visitor only sees the title and a short description, on some others they only see the title. If your title doesn’t grab their attention and draw them in, you won’t get a click. If it’s not relevant to the content of the pages you’re bookmarking they won’t stay, and they certainly won’t vote for you.

2. Description

If the title is the most important factor, then for the same reasons the description comes next. You have just a few lines to get your user’s attention and persuade them to click so take your time and make those lines count!

3. First paragraph

OK, so they clicked on the link and have come to your site, but now you need to keep their attention and lead them into the rest of your content. If the first paragraph interests them, there is a good chance they will continue reading, hopefully vote for you, and with luck subscribe to your RSS feed or newsletter. Lose them on the first paragraph though and they’ll hit the back button faster than you can say Digg!

4. Content, content, content

I know I’ve rather laboured this point over my recent posts, but it’s certainly worth mentioning again. Visitors, whether coming from a social bookmarking site, or any other type of traffic, are coming to your site for content. Give them fresh, unique, quality content and a casual drop-in visitor will become a rabid consumer of your material, and a promoter of your site.

5. Submit in English

Obviously, if you’re submitting to a regional site then use your local language, but for most social media, and certainly the big players (Digg, Del.icio.us et al.) English is the universal language. Visitors will expect to see English and you’ll likely put a lot of people off if you use any other language.

6. Make it easy to bookmark

Make sure your pages have a submission button for the major social networks. There are loads of plugins for blog and CMS platforms but my preferred tool is AddThis which makes it very easy for users to submit you to all the major sites, and includes a great stats tool for free.

7. Submit to the correct category

This one might seem pretty obvious, but submitting to the wrong category virtually guarantees that your submission won’t do very well. Some sites won’t have an exact category match (Digg for example has very few categories) but do your best to submit to the most relevant one every time.

8. Not all topics are created equal!

Having said that, certain topics will always do better than others. Keep track of which of your submissions do well on each network. Figure out which are the most popular topics within your niche, and focus your social bookmarking efforts in those areas.

9. Spell check

Do yourself a favour and spend 30 seconds spell checking your submission. It might seem like a small thing but remember, first impressions count and the first thing people will see are your title and description!

10. Check your facts

It’s all very well submitting your content and driving loads of content, but if you have mistakes or incorrect facts in your story people will not be impressed. If half of your comments are pointing out inaccuracies it won’t do much for your credentials, and is likely to put people off coming back.

11. Keeping your visitors

Getting visitors via social bookmarking is one thing, but they will leave just as quickly as they arrived. In order to get the most from this traffic you need to convert them into regular consumers of your content. Make sure you have an RSS feed which is obvious and easy to subscribe to. Have an opt-in form for an email newsletter on the page, and incentivise it to help with subscriptions. Also, provide links to other related content on your site. If users likes what they see, they are likely to want more of the same!

12. Welcome, and respond to comments

Make sure you have comments turned on. If you get lots of people commenting on your content it will encourage more, and is great social proof. Make sure you respond to the comments and keep on top of any spam.

13. Only submit quality, fresh content

Old news is not news… Don’t submit old, out of date stories or below par content. If you ensure that every submission you make is good, you’ll build up a reputation as an authority and attract more followers.

14. Submit at the best time

You may have noticed from your own stats, some days/times tend to be busier than others. After making a new submission you generally have around 24 hours to make the front page, or you’re not going to. To give yourself the best chance of getting a ‘hit’ try to submit when you know most of your users will be online. This will depend from niche to niche, and country to country, but as a very rough guide weekdays tend to be busier than weekends. For a site with a global reach, 10am to 3pm EST tends to be a good time to submit, but test your own submissions to find out what works best for you.

15. Ask for help

Finally, if you want your submission to be bookmarked ask for it. I wouldn’t do this every time, but if you have created a key piece of content, a ‘pillar’ article or a tool that you think will be very popular, then try adding a note at the end, asking your visitors to Digg it if they think it is worthy. You can also try the same thing when sending an email to your list. In the same way that prompting users to comment by asking them to, asking for submissions can be a great help.

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