Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Link Building and the Value of Global Social Networking Sites

We have two new student interns thanks to my lectures at Cal State Northridge. Sho is an exchange student from Japan, and Nora is a recent graduate who is helping me with social media marketing and PR for the hispanic community. We gave Sho a laundry list of websites to open accounts so that he can help us with social network link building. A few of them are Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, MySpace, Jaiku, Del.icio.us and Wikipedia. He can even go into some of his native social networking sites in Japan and build links for our clients.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and social media marketing include the dredges of link building -- something we all hate doing -- but fundamentally one of the most important account maintenance aspects. Link building could be compared to media relations.

My associate Mike Keesling calls honest link building, “White Hat” Search Engine Optimization (SEO) link building strategies, as this relates to rankings in the organic listings of Google. These kind of links are really, really important. As of late, the number and quality of inbound links to a website are what is under scrutiny by Google. Also known as link popularity, the search engines look at this as how other sites consider your site. Would it be important enough to link to?

The search engines don’t want useless artificially created links. There are "Black Hat" link building techniques such as link farms, or link exchanges, which could easily get your site bounced out of the search engines altogether. There are no easy ways to build link popularity these days because the search engines want to see links from authoritative websites that share the same focus as your site, or opinions and reviews – which can easily be done on social networking sites.

Link building will provide additional visibility for your website, so, when you start to work on building links, don't forget those two basic reasons for requesting links. There’s also an art to link building. The secret is to build one of your key words into the link. If I am writing about “social media marketing,” which is one of my key words – then that is also my link, which will be hyperlinked back to a matching phrase on my client’s website. Because of the way that search engines read dontent, you can use links well when they are in headlines, subheadlines, the first sentence and the middle and the last sentence of an article or release.

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