Twitter and Facebook. Ho Hum.

Most of us have read hundreds of posts on the benefit of using social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook.  I won’t go into that here.

This post is about getting just a little more juice out of every new page you add to your website; and every new post you add to your blog.

Your traffic will jump every time you use this trick.  Most of the traffic to your site will be junk.  In other words, it’ll be visitors that are outside of your service area.

So what’s the point?

Two important points.

1. Increasing traffic to your site - whether good or junk traffic - gets the  attention of web monitoring services.  If your website suddenly goes from 500 visits a month to 1000, a number of services - including Google - begin to believe your site is more important.  In Google’s case, traffic is one of the factors that it uses to assign a Page Rank to your site.  And, as we’ve already determined, the higher your Page Rank, the better positioning you’ll get in Google’s results.
2. Some of the traffic may in fact be from your local service area.  Or they may refer your site to friends who are.

How does it work?

Google is starting to recognize that some social bookmarking & sharing sites have some dedicated visitors.  Sites like Digg, Mixx, StumbleUpon, Buzz, del.icio.us, Technorati, Reddit, Yelp , and others are getting lots of Google attention these days.  One SEO says it this way: "Google is camping out on the social bookmarking sites, looking for fresh content ".

I’ve seen that to be absolutely true.  StumbleUpon, in particular, never fails to send anwhere from 20 to 50 visitors within 24 hours of creating a social bookmark there. (Of course, I can see this because I have Google Analytics installed. GA tells me exactly how many visitors I have every day from each and every source and search term.  If you haven’t setup Google Analytics for your website or blog yet, see my post "Benchmarking Your Site " and do it! )

And now there’s a kind of bulk submission service that submits your site to many of those I listed there - OnlyWire .  Simply submit your blog post or new web page to OnlyWire, and it’ll syndicate it to a bunch of social bookmark services.  Note, though, that you have to have an account already setup on any service you want OnlyWire to post to.

Social Bookmarking - what is it?

If you’re not familiar with the sites I mentioned, go check them out now.

Basically, it works like this.  People submit sites they find interesting, and the site promotes them to their other visitors.  If people agree that they’re interesting, they vote "thumbs up" or something similar.

Whether or not anybody votes for your submission (whether it’s a new page at your website, or a new blog post) is irrelevant to what we’re trying to accomplish.  The very fact that you are submitting it (presuming you write a hypnotic headline) will generate traffic among the social bookmark crowd, that’s looking for cool things to read.

If your post really does generate some interest, though, and people decide to promote it, you’ll get tons of GoogleJuice.  I’ve gotten over 300 hits in the last 30 days from an article I wrote for Hubpages - "8K Tax Credit as Down Payment for your Home " - largely because I promoted it to the social bookmarking sites.

Again, a lot of this was traffic that I can’t really sell to, because they’re outside my service area.  But when I’m doing this a couple times a month, it gooses my traffic, and Google notices this over time.

Try it!