Over the last two weeks we have conducted two different experiments to measure what social media sites sent traffic. In creating the test environment we deliberately picked two blogs that were unknown with no existing backlinks to them. We also did not attempt to “game” or promote these blog post on any of the social media sites that we contacted.

Our first experiment was with a blog post called The Story of Tea. We submitted the post to 20 social media sites and watched the page become the 3rd most viewed page on the site with 826 page views! The second post was called “Shopping For Tents” and we submitted the post of about 30 social media sites. That post has had 303 page views.  Read more... (680 words, 1 image, estimated 2:43 mins reading time)

Thursday marked day four of this weeks social media traffic experiment. Not surprisingly traffic has slowed down, but with over 300 page views this week, the post continues to receive traffic and readers.

On Thursday afternoon I submitted the post to Fark.com and I was happy to see 8 referrals to the site yesterday. The social media sites sending traffic to the blog are:  Read more... (237 words, 1 image, estimated 57 secs reading time)

• Stumbleupon.com – 117 Visits
• Reddit.com – 28 Visits
• Fark – 8 visits
• Digg.com – 4 Visits
• Google Referral – 3 Visit (this is for Google bookmarks)
• Indianpad.com – 2 Visits

It is quite apparent after only two tests that links from social media sites can have a very positive impact on your search engine rankings, especially with Google.

As Adam Snider of Law Depot commented yesterday:

Ranking high in search results is one of the huge payoffs I’ve noticed while submitting to social bookmarking sites. Even if a particular site doesn’t bring a lot of direct traffic, these sites tend to get indexed often and rank high in Google’s SERPs. Even if no one from Digg actually visits your site, just having the link on Digg will boost your search results, which is a benefit that certainly can’t be ignored.  Read more... (367 words, 1 image, estimated 1:28 mins reading time)

Tuesday marked day two of this weeks social media traffic experiment and the big news was the surprising SEO results of the page.

The first surprise was that Yahoo has already spidered the site and is showing a backlink from Del.icio.us. The second surprise was a Google search for the blog post title “Shopping For Tents” shows two results on the home page for the post. One leads to Digg and the second leads to Reddit. So in less than a week we were able to get our blog post onto the first page of Google for a phrase with over 1.8 million competing pages purely on the strength of links from social media sites.
Overall the blog post has been viewed 268 times this week. The social media sites sending traffic to the blog are:  Read more... (202 words, 1 image, estimated 48 secs reading time)