As we have discussed in previous seminars, it isn't enough to simply create a website or start a blog, you need to promote it, and you need to have it available for people to find in the search engines. Luckily, building backlinks that point to your website helps with both of these efforts.
The problem with getting high quality, one-way links is that you often can't control the source page, and therefore you can't control what anchor text is used, or what page on your site it might point to. By creating your own external content with social media, you can improve the odds that the links fit your content, as well as organically raise the value of your brand in the eyes of potential consumers.
The two best ways to generate high quality links are posting guest articles on other blogs and Syndicating Articles. In reality, these two are the same, but with a guest article on a blog, you are giving the blog owner exclusive rights to use your content, where as with most article syndication networks it is available for anyone to post and you don't have control over where it will appear.
Five rules to follow when creating social media content:
- Answer a question, or solve a problem.
- Have a specific keyword phrase in mind that you want to target. Use that in the title, and throughout the body of the article.
- Make your title attention grabbing
- Article length should be no less than 300 words, and no more than 1000. If it is a longer topic, you should break it up into multiple articles or posts with each having a unique keyword phrase target.
- Limit the number of links to your website / blog to one or two. One link should contain anchor text that is related to your keyword phrase target i.e. search engine optimization, and one link should feature the URL of your website. i.e. http://www.marketinghelpnet.com This is so that the reader clicks where you want them to, and by having your URL as a link it ensures that they don't miss it because it is hidden behind anchor text.
Beyond blogs and syndicated articles there are other places where you can create content that will pass link value back to your website or blog, as well as generating organic traffic flow.
Squidoo
Google apparently loves Squidoo lenses, and especially well constructed ones that are ranked well. The concept of a Squidoo lens is simple - pick a topic and then aggregate content so that the lense becomes an authority on the subject. For a travel company, this might be a series of lenses about different destinations, with photos pulled from flickr, books about the destination from amazon.com, a brief description written by you, and various links to websites related to the topic.
HubPages
HubPages is newer, but offers a tremendous amount of potential as an alternative to article syndication since the content only appears on hubpages.com, but it can be voted on by the community, people can comment on the "pages" and each page is ranked by HubPages for its quality.
Wiki How
If you have a topic that is a good "how to" type article, this is a great site to post it.
Yahoo Answers
Yahoo Answers features thousands of people around the world are looking for answers on topics ranging from restaurants to public relations tips. This is your chance to be a hero and simultaneously build your brand, as well as build links to your website. Saddly though, Yahoo Answers uses the "nofollow" tag which tells search engines not to treat it like a link, but it can still drive normal traffic to your site.
Promoting your Social Media Content:
Once you have created your social media content, you will need to promote it, so that ideally it generates both traffic, as well as long-term appeal and potentially gains some value to the search engines. Unless people make comments, vote positively, share it with others, or other positive interaction, there is no real value to your link. Luckily, if you follow the five rules above, your content should find a good place in the search engines and also the social media world and produce on-going dividens for your site for weeks and months to come.
To help the process of attracting people to your newly created content there are several tools you should employ to do make your social media content more valuable and turn plain old links into high quality backlinks that will benefit your blog or business website. These are only a handful, you will probably find industry specific sites as well as these general purpose ones.
- StumbleUpon
- Digg
- Sphinn
- Kirtsy (formerly Sk*rt)
All of these sites have communities of people that are constantly looking for new and interesting web content and often are decision makers and trend setters since they also run their own blogs as well.
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