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 social networking sites such as Digg.

As Digg explains things, it is “a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web.”

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

There is a phenomena called the Digg effect, which can bring a ton of traffic to your site in a small amount of time – sometimes within minutes.

Everything on Digg, from news to videos to images — is submitted by the digg community. Once something is submitted, other people see it and Digg what they like best. If your submission receives enough Diggs, it is promoted to the front page for millions of visitors to see.

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 use this site for your benefit?

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 and get some of the top users on Digg to vote for your story, you’ll have no time reaching the front.

While there are sites that sell services to “Digg” stories for you, at some point in time, Digg will put a stop to 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 react to.

You need to have a compelling title and summary to get any reader to even bother checking out your site. This can also be called link baiting and is covered in another part of this blog. Link baiting is fast becoming a golden way to get quick traffic.

The other thing to consider is to review all of Digg’s categories – if your story does 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.

Digg users are generally tech-savvy so you will need to be patient and become part of the Digg community by submitting great stories you find – often, 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 Digg credibility while your at it.