actually, social bookmarking is quite effective in getting your site ranked as it provides good strong backlinks especially if you make it to the front page of sites like digg and stumble. So besides getting your site noticed, it will help in your rankings. Apart from this, agree with the submission to search engines portion
IF your site gets to the front page of Digg or Stumbleupon, your site will get other links, and those will get your site good ranking. But getting submitted (which is very different from making it to the front page) in itself does not get you good rankings at all. Not many people get to the front page of these things. Of the 10+ pages of mine that get stumble traffic regularly, only one made it to the stumbleupon front page. Yes - that one did get me backlinks, but stumbleupon in general just brings me more regular visitors.
It was just popular. I didn't do anything different for that page compared to other pages of mine that get stumbled. The content was just a tad bit more viral, I guess. For me it's a hit and miss kind of thing. I do think I have a sense by now of which content on my site is stumbleupon material - I did think when creating that page that it might be interesting for stumblers. But I did NOT thumb it up, because it's better if the first thumb up is by someone else. When I noticed it did get stumbles, I did thumb it up - but by then my vote was just one among many. I'm not sure that one vote even makes that big a difference. The ultimate result was beyond my expectations. After all, to get to the front page a page has to get a lot of thumbs up - way more then just from the regular people who thumb up stuff from my site.
ic. but how does a site get to the frontpage of stumble? Does not seem clear to me on their website.....
Personally 1 & 5 have done the most for me. Article submissions and directory submissions don't bring that much traffic. Submit to the top search engines, and everyone else will follow. ttgapers
Stumbleupon works by people installing their toolbar. Then when they like pages they give them literally thumbs up through the toolbar. When they click the stumble button, they will be shown pages that other people with their interests (you tell stumble your interests) have thumbed up. If a site gets thumbed up a lot in a short period of time, it will be shown to more people, will get even more thumbs up and at some point it gets into the top 10 of the last 24 hours (or something) and that's the main page. So it's about getting a lot of people to thumb up a page in a short period of time. With each thumb up more people get shown the page.
By article submission, you just mean submitting articles to ezine and other article directories, correct?