Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon can each provide a site with the opportunity to grab thousands of visitors per day as long as they provide the right content. Users can develop social networks by using these sites, and that can help them to have a lot more success with their articles. Their network friends can easily help them by voting for their content.
For about the last year, I have been watching my statistics closely so that I can get an idea of how social traffic performs against search engine traffic. The differences are quite interesting - the two types of visitors interact in a totally opposite manner on websites.
The first thing I looked at was the conversion rate of social traffic to sales and ad clicks. I found this very interesting - on good social traffic days my site can easily receive a few thousand extra visitors. The problem is that even with a ton of extra visitors, my site rarely made more sales than usual. The site also didn't have an increase in ad clicks.
Search traffic has a very opposite effect. When I have big search days, I almost always generate more revenue. I believe this gives us a psychological look into the minds of visitors that come from the different sources.
Social traffic is looking to be entertained. They will jump quickly from one site to the next searching for entertainment. The key is that they aren't looking for anything in particular. Search traffic is generally looking for answers and they will take extra time to look for it. They will stay on a website longer and are much more likely to make purchases.
During this research study, I also tracked the amount of links the different types of traffic generated. Social traffic generates over 10 times as many links as search traffic due to the increased technical ability of this type of web user. Users of social traffic sites are a lot more likely to have sites and blogs of their own and this contributes to the increased links that are gained from social traffic.
If you have a site, make sure you leverage social media to get links. Getting links will lead to more traffic from search engines, and search engine traffic is going to be where you make your money.
Just about any of your internet marketing efforts begin with finding keywords that people are actually searching for that you can use to get traffic. One of the most solid ways to get visitors to your website is through the search engines. Start your research by brainstorming a list of keyword phrases that match what your website will be about or what you believe people are searching for when you want them to find your website. I've found that using a spreadsheet is the best way to keep track of your keywords. If you don't currently own Microsoft Office, you can use Google Docs or OpenOffice. From the more broad keyword phrases, you'll be able to take more specific keyword phrases that indicate individuals being more apt to take action or buy products or services from you. For instance, someone that searches for "mp3 players" isn't as ready to actually buy an mp3 player versus someone who searches for "32GB iPod Touch 2nd Gen". Now, when you end up reviewing the competition for these keywords, there are millions of pages using the keyword phrases "mp3 players" but only a few thousand pages that use "32GB iPod Touch 2nd Gen". Now that you've found both some broad and "long-tail" keyword phrases, it's time to see how many times per month these keywords get searched for. There are several free tools you can use to help you get these estimates. Freekeywords.wordtracker.com is one tool and another is Google Adwords keyword tool. These will both give estimates on monthly searches. Don't rely on just one of these tools, be sure to cross reference results so that you don't spend a lot of time going for a keyword phrase that doesn't really get that many searches. When you have data about how many searches get done on these keywords, you'll need to cross reference the competition. You'll need to know how many other websites there are on the internet that contain your keyword phrase. Google has in its index a lot of websites and you'll be able to get some data on how many pages Google has where your keyword phrases are being used. Google has some advanced search features that will tell you how many pages there are in its index that contain your keyword phrase in some strategic places. If you search with Google for the allinanchor or allintitle results, you'll have data about how often your keyword phrase is used as anchor text or used in the title of the website. When evaluating which keywords are "good" keywords or good keyword phrases, you can usually tell after you've been doing this a while. I usually start with keyword phrases that get at least 100 searches per day. Obviously the more searches per day, the better. As far as competition, I usually look for keyword phrases with less than 10,000 allintitle results. The lower the competition, the better. Finding keywords is just the start. Once you have your keyword phrases, you'll need to place those strategically in your web pages including in the page title, h1 tags, and within the content of the page itself. Ideally, you'll have about a 3-5% keyword density. What this means is that you'll use your 2-3 word keyword phrase about 1-2 times for every 100 words. If you have a few paragraphs in your blog post or your web page, plan on about 1 keyword phrase per paragraph. If you use those keyword phrases in the right way, you'll be on your way to getting those top rankings.