Summary: Social media can be a valuable part of your linking campaign. You can exploit three types of sites:
- Bookmarking sites
- Social news sites
- Social networking sites
So you’re looking for good quality, trusted links to your website. You know how page rank works and how to build a better page rank for your website. You know the value of links with good anchor text. Can social media sites help with your campaign? The answer is yes, for sure – if you use them right.
Social media sites fall roughly into three categories – bookmarking, social news and social networks. These sites can play a really valuable role in your link building strategy.
Digg allows you to flag articles and add a short review, for others to see. People ‘Digg’ the article and the articles with the most Diggs end up on the front page. If you can get your ‘story’ on the front page of Digg, you’ll see it can receive thousands of visitors and hundreds of links. Most of these will be low quality links, but inevitably, there will be a decent proportion of high quality links too. Conversely, if your article is rubbish, it’ll be pushed down and out of the results. Because you’re dealing with human reviews rather than search engine algorithms, you need to make sure the content you’re promoting is absolutely spot on – interesting, relevant and worthy of being shared. Would you Digg the article if you found it? If not, have a rethink!
Another bonus is that, because these sites enjoy a level of trust from the search engines, articles that are keyword rich in competitive keywords can end up ranking well for those particular keywords. To secure the best chance of this happening, use the competitive keywords in the title to the article itself, and the title of the article submission. These are the two elements grabbed by people linking to the article, to be used in their anchor text.
Delicious and StumbleUpon work in a slightly different way. Delicious allows you to bookmark sites for you to find later. StumbleUpon does the same, but in addition, adds a ‘content discovery’ feature to its services. Both Delicious and Stumbleupon have a popular content page for articles that are deemed ‘hot’ at the moment. As for Digg, getting on the popular content page can bring plenty of traffic, and the quality of that tends to be better than the quality of traffic from social news websites. Again there is plenty of opportunity for quality links.
Social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn allow you to create a profile and link back to your website. These can be used for links and then for building up followers who are interested in content relating to your product or service. Crucially websites like LinkedIn do not put the ‘nofollow’ attribute on their links so they can and do contribute to your page rank – although remember, you need to ensure that the page you create is relevant for maximum benefit.
Other sites that don’t add the ‘nofollow’ attribute include Flickr, Digg, Propeller, Current, Kirtsy, PostOnFire, Corank, BloggingZoom, MyBlogLog and Technorati.
Make sure you check out our list of social media websites which includes bookmarking, social networks, social news sites and other handy links!
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