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This guest post was submitted by Patrick from Piggy Bank Pie Writing Services.

You’ve probably heard of Search Engine Optimization hundreds of time. But bloggers these days are looking at more efficient ways to drive traffic instantly. The answer resides in Social Media Optimization.

There are numerous social media sites on the Internet. Some are specialized in news feeding, others in bookmarking, but the main point is, they are tools you can use to promote quality content published on your blog. Now, I cannot stress how important this last sentence is. Promoting every single post that comes out of your blog may put you in trouble. You will be seen as a spammer, and users will simply ignore you. But if used wisely, social media sites can really boost your traffic and give you high, very high visibility.

Let’s look how we can nitro boost your traffic using social media sites.

1. Install ShareThis

Let’s start with the basic. If you want to help your blog with social media sites, you need the provide a tool for readers to help them vote and promote your content. The best one I know is ShareThis. This plugin combines most of the social media submission links into one applet, and the installation is done in a snap.

2. Activate FeedBurner FeedFlare

Many of your readers will grab your posts right off your RSS feed. But when comes the time to get votes, these readers are away from your site, and therefore less likely to give their thumbs up… unless you activate FeedFlare. FeedFlare ads a footer at the bottom of each of your articles in your RSS feed. It displays the count of Stumbles, Diggs, comments, Del.icio.uses, etc. Not only subscribers get instant and dynamic information of how the post is doing on social media sites, but with a simple click they can cast their vote, helping you reach even more readers.

3. Get The Sphinn Button

If you wish to play the social media game, you need to play it right. Leaving aside the Sphinn community would be a mistake. More and more bloggers are using Sphinn to promote… what’s often buried in minutes on Digg: Internet Marketing and Blogging content. Sphinn is not BloggingZoom though, you should be careful not to submit only your own posts. Provide Sphinn fans their favorite tool and install the Sphinn submit button on your site.

4. Write a Diggbait

What is a Diggbait? It is a post especially written for Digg users. Writing a good Diggbait can bring so much traffic that very often, shared servers (cheap hosting deals) collide under the pressure of gigantic network load. But still, if you survive a Diggbait, you can easily add hundreds of new RSS subscribers to your blog. Your host here, Collin Lahay, previously wrote this Diggbait and received 70,979 visitors from Digg in 3 days! You can read the results of his experience in this post.

5. Help Your Blog To Survive DiggBaits

If you read digg on a regular basis, chances are you’ve been sent to a site that collapsed under pressure. If you decide to focus your energy on Digg, help yourself by installing WP-Cache or WP Super Cache. The concept of caching is very simple. Each time a visitor goes to your blog, a PHP request queries your WordPress database and retrieves the content that goes into your page (the text you wrote). This might sounds like an instant process, but thousands users reading the same page mostly at the time would badly impact your server’s performance. Instead of going through this database querying process, a caching plugin saves a copy of your pages including their content on the server’s hard disk, leaving slow database calls aside. Surviving mammoth traffic from social media sites will surely help your blog’s reputation, and Digg users will be confident they can safely submit content from your site.

6. Invest In StumbleUpon

A poll on ProBlogger asked readers what was their favorite social bookmarking site. 34% of voters said StumbleUpon. The closest followers were Del.icio.us and Digg with 21% and 18% respectively. When stumblers are going nuts for a post on your blog, you can easily expect hundreds of unique visitors in a day. Now the question is, can you stumble your own post? Yes you can, just don’t overdo it. By using SU on a daily basis, you will vote sites and participate in the community. Develop friendships and socialize with other users to build a strong profile.

7. Optimize Your Content For Social Media

It is well-known that users from social media sites have a very short attention span. What it means for you is that if you wish to promote content on these sites, you need to slightly adjust your writing. Never-ending posts where readers can get lost in paragraphs and paragraphs of text will not work. Keep in mind that not only you are writing for the web, but in this case you are writing for social media users. Let’s digg into the mind of a StumbleUpon user (that was a social media joke.) Ok, you click the Stumble! button and a site shows up. Your eyes are seeing what’s above the fold, which means, you’ll see a title and maybe the first paragraph. Now remember, the eyes are looking at the title, but the mouse pointer is still on top of the Stumble! button. Your mission, as a writer, is to provoke a mouse movement to push the pointer away from this location and prevent the user’s index finger from clicking the trigger. First thing you need is a killer title. Now if you pass this step, readers are heading for the first paragraph. Tell them what they can expect but don’t give too much information, you want them to reach the bottom of the page. Remember that social media users love bulleted and numbered lists. This makes your post easily scannable, and increases chances of being voted.

8. Play By The Rules, But…

To rap this up, I’ll conclude by sharing some explorations I’ve done recently. Blog Catalog has user groups where you can post vote requests for either Digg or StumbleUpon. When you feel like you have something valuable to share, like killer content, you may ask for social media love in order to get more visibility. Now, be VERY careful. I’m not going to say that you shouldn’t join these groups, but you need to know that reciprocal stumbling can get your blog kicked out of SU. I’ve seen users posting vote requests for each and every articles they publish. And sometimes, stuff that would never get submitted otherwise. Concentrate on writing quality content, and votes will fall from the sky. Curious? Go to Blog Catalog and join the Stumble group.

Do you optimize your content for social media sites? Any tips you wish to share? Join the conversation over to comments.