How to get Traffic from Social Bookmarking sites

Pay attention to your Headlines
Many great articles go unnoticed on social bookmarking sites because their headline is not catchy enough. Your headline is the first (and very often the only) thing users will see from your article, so if you don't make the effort to provide a catchy headline, your chances of getting to the front page are small.
Here are some examples to start with :-

Original headline : The Two Types of Cognition
Modified Headline : Learn to Understand Your Own Intelligence

Original headline: Neat way to organize and find anything in your purse instantly!
Modified Headline : How to Instantly Find Anything in Your Purse

Write a meaningful & short description
The headline is very important to draw attention but if you want to keep that attention, a meaningful description is vital. The description must be slightly provocative because this draws more attention but still, never use lies and false facts to provoke interest. For instance, if your write “This article will reveal to you the 10 sure ways to deal with stress once and forever and live like a king from now on.” visitors will hardly think that your story is true and facts-based.

You also might be tempted to use a long tell-it-all paragraph to describe your great masterpiece but have in mind that many users will not bother to read anything over 100-150 characters. Additionally, some of the social bookmarking sites limit descriptions, so you'd better think in advance how to describe your article as briefly as possible.


Have a great first paragraph
This is a rule that is always true but for successful social bookmarking it is even more important. If you have successfully passed Level 1 (headlines) and Level 2 (description) in the Catch the User's Attraction game, don't let a bad first paragraph make them leave your site.


to be continue

What is a Specialized Search Engine?

Specialized search engines are one more tool to include in your SEO arsenal. Unlike general-purpose search engines, specialized search engines index pages for particular topics only and very often there are many pages that cannot be found in general-purpose search engines but only in specialized ones. Some of the specialized search engines are huge sites that actually host the resources they link to, or used to be search directories but have evolved to include links not only to sites that were submitted to them. There are many specialized search engines for every imaginable topic and it is always wise to be aware of the specialized search engines for your niche. The examples in the next section are by no means a full list of specialized search engines but are aimed to give you the idea of what is available. If you search harder on the Web, you will find many more resources.
Examples of Specialized Search Engines

Probably specialized search engines are not that numeric as Web directories but still certainly there is no shortage of them either, especially if one counts password-protected sites with database accessible only from within the site as a specialized search engine. As with Web directories, if there were a list of specialized search engines it would be really, really long (and constantly changing), so instead, here are some links to lists of search engines: Pandia Powersearch, Webquest, Virtual Search Engines, the already mentioned The Search Engines Directory, etc. What is common for these lists is that they offer a selection of specialized search engines, arranged by topic, so it is a good starting point for the hunt of specialized search engines.

What is a Web Directory?

Web directories (or as they are better known – search directories) existed before the search engines, especially Google, became popular. As the name implies, web directories are directories where different resources are gathered. Similarly to desktop directories, where you gather files in a directory based on some criterion, Web directories are just enormous collections of links to sites, arranged in different categories. The sites in a Web directory are listed in some order (most often alphabetic but it is not necessarily so) and users browse through them.

Although many Web directories offer a search functionality of some kind (otherwise it will be impossible to browse thousands of pages for let's say Computers), search directories are fundamentally different from search engines in the two ways – most directories are edited by humans and URLs are not gathered automatically by spiders but submitted by site owners. The main advantage of Web directories is that no matter how clever spiders become, when there is a human to view and check the pages, there is a lesser chance that pages will be classified in the wrong categories. The disadvantages of the first difference are that the lists in web directories are sometimes outdated, if no human was available to do the editing and checking for some time (but this is not that bad because search engines also deliver pages that do not exist anymore) and that sometimes you might have to wait half an year before being included in a search directory.

The second difference – no spiders – means that you must go and submit your URL to the search directory, rather than sit and wait for the spider to come to your site. Fortunately, this is done only once for each directory, so it is not that bad.

Once you are included in a particular directory, in most cases you can stay there as long as you wish to and wait for people (and search engines) to find you. The fact that a link to your site appears in a respectable Web directory is good because first, it is a backlink and second, you increase your visibility for spiders, which in turn raises your chance to be indexed by them.

Specialized Search Engines

SEO experts spend most of their time optimizing for Google and occasionally one or two other search engines. There is nothing wrong in it and it is most logical, having in mind that topping Google is the lion's share in Web popularity but very often, no matter what you do, topping Google does not happen. Or sometimes, the price you need to pay (not literally but in terms of effort and time) to top Google and keep there is too high. Maybe we should mention here the ultimate SEO nightmare – being banned from Google, when you simply can't use Google (or not at least until you are readmitted to the club) and no matter if you like it or not, you need to have a look about possible alternatives.
What are Google Alternatives

The first alternative to Google is obvious – optimize for the other major search engines, if you have not done it already. Yahoo! and MSN (to a lesser degree) can bring you enough visitors, though sometimes it is virtually impossible to optimize for the three of them at the same time because of the differences in their algorithms. You could also optimize your site for (or at least submit to) some of the other search engines (Lycos, Excite, Netscape, etc.) but having in mind that they altogether hardly have over 3-5% of the Web search traffic, do not expect much.

Another alternative is to submit to search directories (also known as Web directories) and specialized search engines. Search directories might sound so pre-Google but submitting to the right directories might prove better than optimizing for MSN, for example. Specialized search engines and portals have the advantage that the audience they attract consists of people who are interested in a particular topic and if this is your topic, you can get to your target audience directly. It is true that specialized search engines will not bring you as many visitors, as if you were topping Google but the quality of these visitors is extremely high.

Naming all Google alternatives would be a long list and it is outside the scope of this article but just to be a little more precise about what alternatives exist, we cannot skip SEO instruments like posting to blogs and forums or paid advertisements.

Ref :
http://www.webconfs.com