Social bookmarking is a great way to drive more traffic to your website as well as telling many more people about your blog posts.  Allowing your visitors, who love your blog posts to recommend it to others, as well as bookmark it so that they can go back and re-read your blog post at a later date.  It may be that your post has a great how to instruction on doing something or perhaps it’s a list of resources that you’ve compiled.

There are a few main social bookmarking sites that you’ve probably heard about – Digg, Stumbleupon, Delicious and Diigo that are very popular with users, and you can follow others bookmark accounts to see what they have been bookmarking.

When using social bookmarking it’s a good idea not to just bookmark your own websites all the time as the search engines might get wise to what you are doing, it’s better to have a mix of sites you’ve bookmarked.

Also it is good to know that often when you get traffic from bookmarked websites it can often be quick traffic, in that they have come to your website out of curiousity and unless you make an instant good impression, they will leave quickly.  So if you are getting lots of traffic but no conversions then you should think about editing your content to be more appealing to visitors, that is unless you are getting conversions on your page from other traffic.

As you can see at the bottom of this blog post, I have many different social bookmarks available for you to use to bookmark this post.  The plugin I used is called Sexy Bookmarks, and if you like this plugin, you can add it to your WordPress blog too, very easily.

All you need to do is go to Plugins – Add New – and in the search bar, search for “sexy bookmarks” and when it appears in your list, click on “install”.

Once you have installed Sexy Bookmarks you will now be using social media to promote your website.  Make sure you have Google Analytics installed on your website so that you can then track how effective this is for your site.

DMOZ.org has to be the number one online directory to get your website submitted to, as well as appear in.  It has been around almost as long as the internet has.  Unfortunately as it gets so many submissions each day, it can often take months to be listed, and sometimes you may not get listed.

The sooner you submit your website to the DMOZ directory, the better.  However, I would make sure that your website is in a completed state before you submit it, even although it may take months to be listed.

As with all the traffic generation and backlinking strategies you carry out for your business, some will give you immediately results and others will be much slower.  Also there are strategies that will bring short term results and others that bring in long term results.  Submitting your website to not only DMOZ but other directories should be thought of as giving a slow but long term result.

When submitting your website, make sure that you choose the category that best fits your business and only submit your site once, to only one category.  If your website is found to be breaking these rules not only will you not get your website submitted, you will probably be banned from submitting other websites.

Also when submitting your website, don’t use over the top promotional words in your submission description as you will end up being rejected and you don’t want to have to wait months to be included again.

The DMOZ is administered by real people who volunteer to look after a certain category, or categories, and manually approve the submissions.  If your category doesn’t have a volunteer looking after it then you may find it’s even longer to get your submission accepted.  One way to get around that is to volunteer to administer that category!  To volunteer, just fill in the volunteers form and send it off and someone will get back to you with more information.