Link Building In The Social Age

posted by Ted on November 24, 2011

Search engine optimization is a fast-paced environment with a constantly changing landscape. Ten or so years ago, the right meta-tags and proper use of ‘keyword stuffing’ might just have been enough to send a website on its way to ranking well. However, the ever-improving sophistication of the search engines and their ongoing battle with website owners has seen more than just a few movements of the proverbial goalposts.

At the heart of contemporary thinking is the importance of building quality, trusted links that can act almost like academic citations to identify which websites merit credibility and deserve to rank for a given keyword phrase.  At the same time, the explosion of the social web has led to a rise in the number of different marketing opportunities online, both in terms of building links and raising your profile.

The key to link building is creativity, and it’s important to understand what can be a vast difference in the quality of your various links.  Not all of them are created equally, but all do tend to offer some value to the site they are linking to.  As a general rule, the harder a link is to obtain, the more likely it will be a strong link that boosts your search engine profile. The number of links a given website needs to get it ranked can vary greatly depending on the level of competition in its niche. In most cases, building a strong platform through social media should be sufficient to give you a head start. So how should you go about building a quality backlink portfolio that will, over time, make your site more search-engine friendly?

As a first step, it’s good to go through every page of your site and bookmark it with several dedicated social bookmarking sites (the most important ones are considered to be Digg, Reddit and Propellor). Use your chosen keyword phrase as the title for your submission, include keyword-rich tags where possible, and ensure your commentary contains your core keywords in its context.  Try to make your listings seem like genuine recommendations, and stagger the submission process so your site doesn’t get flagged for trying to spam or trick the search engines.

If you haven’t done so already, set up profile pages on the web’s best-known social networks (Twitter, Facebook, etc), and build a few links to each of your pages through social bookmarking at Digg, Reddit and Propellor.  This will give your links from your social profiles a little more weight and will create a more obvious chain for search engine spiders to find and crawl your site.

While social bookmarking is it’s not the be all and end all when it comes to link building, using it to your advantage should be a core component of any modern link building campaign. With a little creativity, it can be a massively useful addition to your off-site SEO efforts.

Tags:backlinks,effective website,internet marketing,link building,search engine,Social bookmarking,social networking,website optimization