One thing I haven’t noticed a lot of people talk about is building links to your social media content which can do wonders for both your flow of link juice, but also within the top 10 rankings. I offer this to my clients during a link building campaign and I’ll tell you what I tell them. Unless they have unique and quality content this won’t work out so well, or will look badly. Keep in mind that all the content in forms of words you put out there on social media sites, make sure it’s unique to avoid the ever so dreaded dupe content penalty.
Most social media sites will rank for most long tail keywords, and even for a highly competitive keyword if done right. This can be a powerful method because if you’re launching a new service or product within a tough niche, you can at least start grabbing some top search engine spots with your social media while you wait for your main site to develop some trust. A lot of these sites allow you to obtain a one way link which helps in the long run greatly. If you think about it you’re getting that link within content that’s on topic and coming from an authorative site.
Gain More Than One Top 10 Ranking:
There are so many social media sites out there I suggest you stick with the best to begin with, then venture out into the web 2.0 web and find more social sites that perhaps are designed around your niche. When I’m working with clients on a contract basis it usually involves me using social media to get information about them or their product within the top 10-20 spots in Google. This can be as simple as creating a Youtube video and naming it after the keyword you’re targeting, hell, make a few videos even. Another method is getting a Flickr picture ranked well by again titling it with the proper keywords and then doing things like sharing the picture with Flickr groups and other social photography sites. There are so many other posibilites such as the ever popular Squidoo and Hubpages which if done right can rank easily.
Facebook has recently allow business’s to create pages which I’ve seen starting to rank well for a lot of keywords. Getting your business listed with the Yellow Pages can also get your company listed in the business listings that show up at the top of a Google search page, as well within Google Maps. I’ve even seen a lot of people target their Craigslist ads with the right title and keywords which ranked very well for a lot of juicy keywords.
So you can see that the benefit of having quality content up on these sites for not only links but exposure. Now not all of the social media content you create will make it within the top 10 or even 20 spots in Google. So this is where some well crafted and cautious link building can be done to push the already weighted link up in the SERPs. Depending on where and what type of media you’re pushing you’ll want to approach the link building in a smart manor. Lets go over a few of the social media sites in the next bit here.
Building Links To Your Social Media:
Youtube – Youtube usually has little to no trouble ranking for most long tail keywords and hard to rank for terms. It’s no secret that Google loves video, owns Youtube, and it’s starting to have the same love as Wikipedia once did. Youtube videos ranks are also influenced by the rating on Youtube, and Google can tell when a video is quality and original. You can do a few simple things like social bookmarking your video to give it an extra link juice boost. Incorporating your video within your Squidoo pages, Hubpages and other social media will help bring up its quality as well give it a few links.
Squidoo – Squidoo pages are great because you can create a content rich page with not only articles, but with other forms of social media all tied in. Link Building for your Squidoo Lens is worth the time and has an abundance of different options. First off you can submit your Lens to a number of sites designed to promote Squidoo Len’s which I’ve already blogged about. This alone will greatly help with the ranking of your Lens.
Flickr – Flickr is an amazing site that is love by Google and Yahoo(I wonder why :) and provides a great way to bring some targeted traffic. Make sure to appropriatly name your photos and then join related Flickr groups to share your pictures. There are several photo sharing sites and blogs, and if you can create some photography that is not only showing off your business or product, but viral in nature. A great picture can go a long way and attract visitors from places a lot of businesses are not tapping into. A client of mine managed to attract a lot of business by taking a lot of great photo sets of a conference he went to which lead to that album ranking well and attracting a lot of search traffic. This is just one great example of how this can work for you. And if all else fails throw a few social bookmarks to the picture page to speed up the indexing process.
RSS Feed Sites – RSS feed sites have been popping up all over the place and RSS Link Building has become a great tool to gain more exposure and links. A lot of the more popular feed sites like RSS Hugger and MillionRSS are great places to have your feed profile ranked within the search engines. This is an added bonus because you’re already getting links and feed subscribers from these sites! There are also RSS based news sites that also provide another way for your media to sneak up in the search engines. Two great examples of sites like this are Aide RSS and Toluu which both give you links and their feed profile pages rank well in the search engines.
Well I hope this has given you folks some more to think about and I know I’m doing nothing but creating 10x the work load for you. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments on what you think or especially from anyone doing this in their link building campaigns.
Busby SEO Test or Busby SEO SPAM Test
I used two different tools to analyze the backlinks of the first two listed there, Yahoo Site Explorer and Backlink Watch. It took me no longer than a few minutes to sell all the blog comments these contestants have used, as well a bunch of other link spamming on sites such as DeviantArt. Now the way these contestants have used questionable tactics is not something you’d want to do for a client, or even for your own site. In the long run Google will catch onto this but for now there’s no doubt that anchor text is still the number one way to rank.
So go ahead and check out some of the contestants links from DeviantArt, blog comments and link exchanges. The comments left behind on blogs are the usualy one liners “thanks for the great information” which defeats the whole purpose of commenting on blogs, and is now a form of spam. This kind of link building gives us all a bad name.
So without getting too nasty or diving in any more into this silly contest what are your thoughts? Am I being rude and unfair? Have you been spammed by a contestant and want to vent? There is a positive and that is the example and real world results you can see from link building, good or bad.