July 1, 2008 – My conclusions thus far is that social bookmarking is a good way to get a buzz going about a website and it can even drive some OK quality traffic, but in order to see long-term benefits I will need to study these techniques further. I did notice that a couple of my sites from this test got picked up by www.alltop.com which is a nice for some additional exposure and traffic but I am not sure if it is a direct result of this case study. It is also worth noting that the post on www.allweirdnews.com I mentioned below also received over 1,100 visits the next month, in June.

May 6, 2008 – I have had a few posts with images up for approximately 20 hours now and there are some notable short-term results. This post on www.allweirdnews.com has generated the most interest. So far I have had 2,163 visitors enter on that page . Considering this blog had a healthy 4,000 visits in total last month, this windfall of instant traffic is very impressive. I decided to make a new post with another image but this is of one that has been around for a while, see the post here. This one has only been up for 45 minutes and has already generated 486 visits, amazing, this one might do better than the first. It seems I have another winner with this post, so far 375 visits in just 25 minutes.

Here are some of the other results, for this post here in the past 45 hours I have received 581 visits, that is not great but it is to a blog that had only 400 visits total in the past 4 months. Another one that did not do very well is this post here, bringing in only 74 visits in the past 45 hours.

So far my conclusion is: this type of promotion is quite powerful but very unpredictable. I will update these stats to see how thing progress and will not do any link building on these sites for the next 4 weeks to see if the social media promotion brings in backlinks.

May 2008 – I have decided to do some testing on driving traffic and building backlinks using social media sites. I am a member in good standing on some of the most popular sites, StumbleUpon, Digg, Milk and Cookies, Reddit and Del.icio.us – I am going to leverage my social media accounts and see if I can drive traffic and build backlinks virally. I am going to test two methods, one is using older popular content (I will be using images so I can also test out and optimize for Google images) and one is using more unique content from a photoshop editing site (with permission of the authors). I know the results won’t exactly be scientific in nature but they should give me a good idea on the effectiveness of using social media in SEO and SEM. I should mention a couple of things, social media traffic is generally know for not clicking any ads (so I won’t expect any) also their bookmarking ratio is much lower, so instead of 1 in 4 it might be closer to 15%-20%.