Everybody wants to improve their search engine ranking to get more visitors. Apart from actively participating in link building process, they are also looking for newer avenues to promote their websites or blogs in social media. This is the web 2.0 scenario where traditional SEO merges with viral marketing to improve ranking.

A lot of people say that the main purpose of social media marketing is to find an alternative to Google traffic (visitors you receive from Google for organic ranking). Now, to develop a sustainable reader base from social media marketing, you would need to work continuously. And for small business and mini site owners, it is a tough job unless you have a continuous content generation platform like a blog or forum. And in most of the cases small website owners do not have them.

In such a situation it is really tough for small website owners to capitalize on social platforms like Digg, Reddit etc.

To add to the situation, if you are a direct seller of some FMCG products and if you cater to a niche group from a specific geographic location, it is really tough to generate more business via these social networks.

To the most, you can use those social networks to communicate with other webmasters in your related industry to get further information on what is happening around or just to get some links for your website.

For small business owners, SEO is still the most cost effective business model. In this model all you need to do is to clean up the website’s code for better crawling, develop a visitor friendly website with easy and targeted navigation, enough optimized and targeted content to convert visitors into business, and try to get as many targeted links as possible to improve search engine rank. That’s it – now you wait for search engines like Google or Yahoo to send you traffic for targeted keywords.

And if you think that you have enough resources and time to spend on social media optimisation to get traffic – find out a niche network where people deal specifically in your domain. For example if you deal with US Real Estate market, you can think about joining and developing a profile at ActiveRain.com. This will also help you develop a working network with other real estate professional in your locality. To add to this, it would also work to create an online cumulative brand identity of your business. And these networks often rank high for long tail keywords.

You would find similar websites in almost every popular niche. And if you do not find any in your niche – you can go ahead a start one network which would eventually help you a lot to grow your own business.

However, if you would like to increase the number of visits in your website via social networks like Digg, you would need to create a blog. One of the primary reasons is that, you can not submit a single page twice in such social network. And thus you would need more pages to publish interesting content that would attract visitors from those social networks. Just to add to these – there is a common saying in SEO industry that visitors from Digg or other similar general networks are not convertible to business.

And if you need visitors from a specific geographic location via organic ranking, you should go for local search engine optimisation. You may contact a local SEO company (eg. Ft Lauderdale SEO) to help you in local search engine optimisation.