Digg is a popular social network that can be an effective part of your search engine strategy. Quantcast has estimated Digg’s unique monthly U.S. audience at 7.2 million. Because of this, Digg can be one of the most potentially effective places to submit your articles.
Digg is a hugely popular network, but you should be warned that its readers despise anything that appears to be marketing. An overt form a promotion probably won’t last 10 seconds on the site, which tends to kick off such promotions, a process it calls “burying.”
This is not to say, however, that Digg cannot be used as a marketing tool. You just have to be a little clever about it. If you are successful, you could drive a horde of visitors to your site, make your site more appealing to link partners and advertisers, and get all the other benefits that come from increased site traffic.
The thing to remember is that Digg is a user-driven site. Everything that appears on Digg Is both submitted and voted on by the site’s community. The members read the content that is submitted to the site and vote on what they like best. If a story you submit happens to be popular and receives enough votes from the members, it could appear on the front page to be viewed by potentially millions of visitors.
There are many apps for the Mac, iPhone and iPad that can help in your Digging efforts. Socialite for Mac, for example, combines Digg, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and RSS into one desktop app. Several widgets for the Mac OS X Dashboard such as digg.com Feed Reader (pictured), Digg News and diggdash let you keep up with Digg.com news at the press of a key.
AddToAny is a button you can add to your blog that allow visitors to bookmark your posts to their favorite social bookmarking service, while Shareaholic is a browser add-on that allows you to bookmark any web page to your own favorite social bookmarking site. Both add-onns support Digg. OnlyWire is a web service and companion app that allows you to bookmark a page to dozens of sites, including Digg. Diggle, Diggify and iDigg bring the Digg experience to your iPhone or iPad.
So how can you make Digg work for you as a SEO tool? First is to remember that content is important. It helps to have a useful or timely article with an effective summary and an attention-grabbing title. You need to get the Digg members to vote on your posting, and without these things you will not even reach square one.
The users of Digg tend to be savvy and will generally not even glance at an article if it smells of promotion. If, however, you should succeed in getting one of your articles in the top 10 read articles on the site’s home page, you can create a kind of buzz and credibility that you could never achieve through the use of keyword-centered articles alone.
