A great way to take advantage of the social media explosion is to do indirect promotions for your website. Basically, indirect promotion is growing your site’s link power by building links to pages linking to it.
Social Media sites are great for for this purpose:
- most social media networks allow you to post a link back to your site on your profile page, so if you do your homework well, you will get a good solid inbound link;
- besides building external links to your profile page (which is time consuming), you can also build the power of your profile page with the help of internal link juice by being (moderately) active at a social media community. For example, by voting for (or commenting at) a popular story at Digg, you get a link to your profile from “Who Dugg it” tab (a story page) and most Digg popular stories obtain solid external and internal link juice that will thus (partially) be transferred to your profile page.
Planning this strategy will both save your time and give you another link juice resource. Here are some quick tips on how to harness the social profiles for internal link building:
- Always pay attention to the site internal nofollow usage. Your efforts may fall short if you spend time building internal links that can’t be followed by search engine robots.
- Make sure your link will be visible to search engines. Mixx, for example, shows “recently voted” to logged-in users and “related stories” to both external visitors and search crawlers.
- Make sure pages you want to link to your profile are not blocked by robots.txt file
- Keep in mind that your social media profile may also help you with your reputation management, so promote it wisely (choose the right username, do not spam, mind your comments, etc)
- If you build links externally, make sure to choose the right profile URL. For example linking to Flickr photo stream page (/photos/XXX/) instead of a profile page (/people/XXX/) is a common mistake. Flickr only allows links from your profile page; so the photo stream page is mostly useless.
Happy Link Building! :).
Of course retaining a professional SEO expertise can can lead to increased link power, search engine visibility and consequently ROI.
I very much enjoyed reading that, some thing I have been working on for some time. Now there is clarity – thank you.
I enjoyed reading your article, Ed. I am fairly new to internet marketing and have been taking notes whenever I read something of relevant interest. I have already begun posting and passing on tips and techniques on my own blog site at http://BestChoiceEbooks.com/blogs. Perhaps you would like to swap links for mutual benefit? Keep up the good work.