Social Bookmarking: A Stumble upon Traffic

Building traffic is the ultimate goal with any SEO activity. Hands down- optimizing for a particular keyword is designed to gather as many visitors from as high up on the Results Page as possible.

The side-kick to SEO is gathering Links. Utilization of social bookmarking tools has been a safe and easily implemented source for User Generated Links. After a week long foray into the actual effectiveness of social bookmarking utilizing Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Stumbleupon, and Twitter on a very fresh blog with no branding, constant traffic or SEO, the results are interesting at the least.

Test Objective:
To determine the best source for traffic among the popular social bookmarking sites. Key metrics: # of visitors, Time spent, Page views per visitor.

Test Application:
With a different post each day- submit to all of the social bookmark sites utilizing a 50-50 schedule of "highly related keywords" and "broad keywords". An example for this would be- "humor, blog" vs. "travel, photo, graffiti, humor, blog, asia". In an interest to see the effect of keyword tagging, for this experiment article descriptions were ignored.

Don't ignore descriptions in your bookmarking. Please =)

After 1 week of 50-50 keyword testing on the above mentioned bookmarking sites, an interesting trend appeared.
The test had given evidence that every other day- there was a boost of traffic relative 10-13 times the other days. Since this test was on a dormant blog that was sitting, looming deletion- that is a notable jump!

To analyze the jump in data- I will clarify that the days that experienced 100+ visitors were in fact the same as the days which Higher relevancy keywords were used. The real ground breaker was this: None of the sites referred more than 2 clicks per day (including highly relevant keyword days), except for StumbleUpon.

With referral visitors coming from Digg, Delicious and Reddit amounting to just 1 visitor per day (each day), and Twitter with 5 per Tweet (~100 followers), the amount of raw traffic coming from StumbleUpon is amazing.

Is it relevant?

Maybe. If your goal is for numbers, then yes, this traffic is awesome. If you are looking to sell, gather prospects or get sign-ups, likely no. The average time on the page (each individual blog post) was at 0:31s. Hopefully this means that each post was read or skimmed- but with pageviews amounting to 1.87 per visitor, there was interest to jump around.

For this test, it shows that for pure traffic- StumbleUpon is the highest referrer, and looking back at the dynamics of these bookmarking networks the reason is clearly visible. The user doesn't see what is coming next. If they utilize the StumbleBar- they click, and can land on your site. Its that easy, the end user has no choice in the matter.

With Digg, Delicious, Reddit and many other sites that bookmark the latest stories and hot topics, to draw attention from the site is much more difficult, as the content you provide must be buzz worthy. When you apply social bookmarking to your site- you will likely have some awesome content to share with the world, and using proper tagging can help the world see it (especially for searching the social bookmarking sites). Using Digg and the big social bookmarking sites requires a big group of active 'friends' and 'fans' of your digging, just as much as StumbleUpon will give you higher Authority the more you Stumble.

If you are starting a blog, or looking to spread your word, for an initial kickstart- and help in possible bookmarkings elsewhere (for digg clicks if you already dugg), give it a Stumble.

-Derek Kean

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