In case you haven’t been on the Internet for the past year or so, there has been a tremendous amount of attention being captured by socially-powered sites such as digg.

So, what does this have to with the world of Search Engine Marketing?

There is something called the Digg effect, which essentially brings a ton of traffic to your site in a small amount of time. (Usually within minutes of a posting).

While digg readers despise seo-planted stories, if you do have something topical or free to use or even something that’s just “cool”, you won’t feel the wrath of the digg community, and end up with your post getting buried.

So how can you leverage this site?

One of the key elements of getting a story on the home page is to have either a ton of people who have “dugg” your posting, or if you happen to know some of the top users on digg to vote for your story, you’ll have no time reaching the front.

For the rest of us, we need to work harder. While there are sites that sell services to “digg” stories for you, at some point in time, digg will wise up and stop that.

There is another site that allows you to alert any of your friends when you have posted on digg, called Digg Alerts.

But despite all the “gaming” that goes on, at the end of the day, you need to have a compelling story to have the readers interact with what you’re saying.

As for the SEO coding and copy writing element of digg, you need to have a great title and summary to get any reader to even bother checking out your site. Another course of action you need to take is to review all of digg’s categories - if your story would not fit on the site, don’t waste your time.

The expectation set forth when using digg in as part of your marketing strategy should be to create buzz, build brand name and drive traffic to your site. To expect digg users to click on your Adsense ads is non-sensical - digg readers are tech-savvy and can smell that technique a mile away. Be patient, post often and become part of the digg community by also submitting great stories you find - often times it will already be posted, but every once in a while you can beat them to the punch, and you gain a little bit of credibility on the site.

-To your online success!

Paul Bliss
www.SEOforGoogle.com