Social Bookmarking Traffic

In the past I’ve been a bit spoiled. With my Bunco site, I’ve got great organic placement, and have had it almost since I created the site. I currently have Authority entries and multiple entries per page for Bunko, Bunco, Bunco Rules, Bunko Rules and many more. When I look at my incoming traffic, even with dozens of great backlinks, more than 90% of my traffic comes from search engines and directories, with a huge percentage of that coming from Google.

With the 30 day Challenge, we of course go out of our way to do SEO, focusing on Google. What is interesting is seeing how the social bookmarking element of the effort to get the word out is really working.

Here’s a very early list of my traffic - site was a week old.

Where Site Traffic comes from

 The social traffic is meant to give us more authority, back links, etc. In my case, it’s giving me all my traffic. And it’s doing it in bursts.

The Stumbleupon.com traffic, all 110 visits came in one day. I guess the early hits came and went and we disappeared deep into the bowels of Stumbleupon.

The direct traffic we can safely ignore - most of that was from my own design work (i haven’t blocked my own IP yet). The Buncorules.com traffic was always thought to be of high value. They are both dice games, can be played in large groups, and I was able to ensure that Farkle Rules was featured prominently on the front page of Bunco Rules. It’s produced a small steady stream since then, and I expect that to go up dramatically now that I have an even better backlink there.

The traffic on this site is actually driving more site to Farkle Rules than I would have expected. I have made no effort to get this site, www.StevenPratt.com, SEO’d or publicized yet. I wanted to wait until I had a lot more value built in. But surprise - surprise, I’m getting a lot more traffic than I would ever have expected. I guess I’m going to have to put analytics on here as well.

Google finally shows up on the list, which is better than I expected, since I only managed to get into the first three pages for about 2 days. I’m confident I’ll be back up front, and it will be nice to see how these numbers work out later, once I’ve been on top for a while.

My Wikipedia entry seems to be doing it’s job as well. Pulling a few people in, who for the most part, stay and look around, which is what we’re looking for.

The Google SEO, turns out to have provided a nice little bump for Yahoo and AOL, neither of which I have put any effort into so far. Maybe I should look into that.  The Digg entry not only didn’t do much, but had a 100% bounce, and miserable on site times.

Nothing earth shattering here, just a little insite into how the traffic is growing for my Micro-niche.