In Neil Patel’s article on Search Engine Land (Three Proven Steps For Getting On Digg’s Homepage), he provides a great rundown on some basic steps to Digging correctly.

There are tons of tricks that people use to get stories on the homepage of Digg. Unfortunately, in their eagerness to get the visibility offered by Digg, most people are ignoring basic submission guidelines. Rather than concentrating on gaming Digg, if you submit stories using some common sense, your chances of hitting the homepage drastically increase. Here are three surefire steps to help you submit stories that Diggers will love to Digg—and, if you’re lucky, get your story on Digg’s homepage.

Neil describes the following 3 steps :

Step 1: Submit the simplest URL – its often possible to have different URLs to the same page (and multiple URLs can split the vote count) – use the simplest one that you can.

Step 2: Create a compelling title and description – When submitting a story, make sure that the title and description is attractive, without being deceiving.

Step 3: Submit to the right category – If you don’t submit a story to the right category there is a chance that a story will not make it because the people who are interested in it may not find it.

StumbleUpon wants to replace web and video search with browsing by integrating some of the best features of social networking. It’s an amalgamation of ideas that takes inspiration from Digg, TiVo, MySpace and just about every other social networking service you can imagine, but it can sure do a lot to increase your traffic.

StumbleUpon is a plug-in that automatically loads websites recommended by its users – based on categories that you select. The company uses tagging to define content, and lets users give a thumbs up or down to rate websites.