These days social networking is one of the keys to driving traffic to your site, but how do you get these socialists to your site and once they have landed on your page how do you keep them there and track what works and what doesn’t?

First of all there is no quick way to do this, so if you are after an over-night traffic surge stop reading and try Google Adwords instead.

For the rest of you, here are some top tips to make your site known and monopolise on traffic.

House Keeping

Your site should validate according to W3C standards, your code should be semantic (markup relates to what is inside), you should only ever use tables for tabular data and you should have both a regularly updated sitemap and RSS feed(s).

Also if your site uses a lot of Flash, SilverLight or JavaScript ensure you have fall-backs, as after all this is what search engines will see.

Ensure your website is Search Engine Optimised and well tagged.

Centralisation

Decide which social networking sites you are going to use from the launch of your site and add more networks as you go. Facebook, Twitter and Digg are good ones to begin with. Create your accounts then consider automating your website content using WordPress plugins or things like Ping.fm. If you use WordPress make sure your ‘ping’ list is up-to-date under the settings > writing section of your admin panel.

A lot of social networking platforms can also post things directly from an RSS feed, however this leads us to our next point…

Human Contact

If someone feels something is automated they are less likely to pay attention or engage with it (automated phones systems are a good example), at the end of the day people like to talk to people. With this in mind try to engage your audience regularly on your social platforms, post personal comments about posts, reply to what people have said and use the platform as market research asking your fans what they like and what they don’t.

StumbleUpon

The first time you submit your site to StumbleUpon you are likely to get a large amount of visits, so make sure your site is perfect and working correctly and that if you receive 20 thousand visits in one day your site can handle it, as most likely you will only get this spike once, so make the most of it!

Live Stats

Using a live statistic programs like Woopra can really help you monopolise traffic to your site. If you see links starting to come inbound from a forum or newsgroup perpetuate this and add fuel to the fire. If you see a specific article is proving popular, stick it to your homepage. If you see a lot of visits coming from another website or blog, contact the owner ask if they want to link exchange; which conveniently and seamlessly (yeah right) leads to our next point…

Back Links, Track Backs and Link Exchanges

Don’t just copy stuff from other sites (this is not good for SEO), however if you are doing this as the article is interesting to your sites target audience then make sure you add track backs to the original site. The original site should have a similar audience so it is likely that users may follow the track backs if they haven’t heard about your site before, but it is of similar context.

Also consider swapping links with other sites of similar sizes and in the same remit, this is a good way to build relations with other site owners and help provide each other with more visitors.

Usability

Visitors to your site should understand what your site is and about almost immediately. The navigation should be clear, hyper-links should be obvious and the style should suit your site; if your site is aimed at IT professionals it should look professional.

Social Bookmarking

If you have a good article than post it on Digg, Reddit and other social bookmarking sites. The worst that could happen is that you get no visits, the best is that you could get thousands. You should also consider automating this also. The more exposure you get on legitimate sites the better.

Interesting and Original

The content of your site should be new, fresh and relevant to your target audience. Copying content from other sites will just help it become buried quicker, especially if you don’t provide track backs. If you continue to post content regularly that is popular, you will soon start to attract loyal followers.

Finally…

Have fun, be yourself and don’t try too hard. The best articles come from the heart as you write them, and not contrived from a marketing committee. If you enjoy writing your content and like your website it is likely that other people of similar mind sets will.