Posted by sam on April 2nd, 2010
Posted in Miscellaneous, Social Media |
Social linking or networking has become the buzzword for guaranteeing link popularity and claiming the top spot in the search engine rankings. Indeed, SEO practitioners have launched link building campaigns within social media environments and have found it a powerful method in getting inbound links within a short time frame. Citizen Sports Network’s link building campaign incorporated social media and made waves in the rankings. The company’s experience is a prime example of the power of social linking. The company operates a website called PROTRADE, which has the feel of a stock market for sports fans and aficionados. Working around a concept where sports players can be bought or sold and consequently, have their values dip or rise just like in Wall Street, the site attracted audiences and generated a vibrant online community. As a result, PROTRADE enjoyed substantial link popularity until the concept of social media wormed its way through the company’s link building strategy. The company built communities within environments like Facebook, OpenSocial and MySpace, and became a monstrous hit on the Web. Soon, PROTRADE had over 20,000 links and Citizen Sports Network had 40,000, including authority links from ESPN, Techcrunch, Batelle Media, and others. From this phenomenon, it becomes easy to appreciate how a link building campaign tied closely to social media can contribute to high rankings for your site.
Depending on what your site offers, your link building campaign could go viral with the use of social media tools.
What is more impressive about link building through social media is that links obtained are completely organic and highly valuable in the eyes of search engines. The catch: with much link popularity to be given from social media, much is also required. If you have less time on your hands, you can hire a social media link building service to handle your promotional campaign.
If you are a hands-on type, here are some tips on how you could generate user following and use social linking to its fullest:
- Feature High Quality Content. Unlike other link popularity strategies, effective use of social linking requires that your site contain high quality or even linkbait content. Without it, you cannot expect to form relationships, which is the core function of social linking. The success of social media in building link popularity is a result of creating a site that is authoritative on a given topic. The use of interactive, compelling materials and relevant content is advantageous for social media.
- Choose A Site That Works For You. The next step is to build relationships with online social networking communities. When you are merely after personal popularity, be free to select any site; but when you are after link popularity, it is important to choose the right ones. The biggest social sites like Digg, Technorati, or Reddit, may have a large community but their target audiences may not be suitable for you. For instance, you don’t want to make the mistake of promoting baby products in Digg, which is a haven for the young and tech savvy. There are other options like Facebook, which has a more mature following. The important thing is to research first and determine which social sites will yield more traffic for you. Popular alternatives to the larger social sites are Facebook and Twitter. Twitter has become a popular choice lately for many people, including celebrities. What you do is link your profile to Twitter and post a “Follow me” when you have an interesting article to share.
- Update Your Properties. Social media sites allow you to feed directly from your blog. This is helpful when you maintain a regularly updated blog. With this feature, you ensure that your social media account is up-to-date and fresh. Some social sites have their built-in ranking application, e.g. Squidoo, which might get you promoted to the search engines.
- Social Netiquette. Social sites are intolerant of bad netiquette. Spamming is shunned and users who promote their profiles excessively endanger themselves of getting reported or their accounts getting terminated. Recovering from a bad online reputation is hard since bad comments cannot be removed or edited. Bad reputation damages your link popularity, and in turn, can have severe consequences on your rankings.
- Engage the Community. Linkbait content is hard to come by on a daily basis so when you are unable to produce viral content, you can be an active member in the community and build relationships. With Twitter, you can follow people or businesses that are of a similar interest to yours. Link out to blog owners that share your niche. Linking out for no reason at all will not yield any traffic for you. When you can, making attention-getting comments to blogs can get you noticed by the owner. Be sure to incorporate some related content into the comment to give other users a general idea of the content in your blog. As you want to keep track of the people you follow, you should do the same with the people following you. Do some research in order to avoid spam followers. Having spam followers may not be bad, but it could affect your credibility.
- Share. Social linking is mutually beneficial if you retweet someone else’s posts. In this way, you get the chance of being followed by people as well. Be an active member of the community. If you use Twitter, retweet posts. If you use StumbleUpon, stumble sites. If you use Digg, dig some sites. This will earn you goodwill and make it easy for you to build relationships with other users. This is after all, the key to link building success in the social media environment.
In order to effectively use social media as a means of obtaining link popularity, your web site, social networking site, or blog must be able to attract attention and build relationships out of online users. This is a tedious task that requires time and serious effort, but the benefits are exponential and worth it.
Tags: link building company, link campaign, link popularity, smo, social media optimization
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