Help Them Find You | Social Media Links

External factors can have a dramatic impact on the strength of your site’s reputation.

Just because outside influences affect your site, however, does not mean you do not have any control over them. Today we will go over an especially important aspect of SEO—link building, or the process of getting your site linked to by several other sites. By getting sites to link to you those sites are passing part of their credibility to your site. When a reputable site like MSN.com creates a link from their site to yours it tells the search engines that they can trust your site. This increases your page’s score in the search metrics and is reflected in the SERP. Unfortunately for most, however, it is easier said than done to get links from the most trust worthy sites.

At this point in the equation is where the value of social media sites like Digg, Wikipedia, and YouTube really becomes apparent. By creating and sharing interesting and engaging content from your site on user-generated social media sites your site not only encourages traffic, but also encourages other people to blog about and link to your site—increasing page rank.

But what if you sell neck ties? What kind of viral content could a neck tie site possibly produce? “How does this strategy help me?” says Larry the neck tie broker. Well first off Larry, you can start a Wikipedia page or Squidoo lens about your business for people to find, of course this would include links back to your store’s site as well as some individual products or product lines. Then it would be time to make a clever YouTube video that pertains to your business, perhaps an amusing or cute commercial that would be noteworthy. After you have done that it would be time to write a blog about how successful you have been and describing how you became so popular. Then follow through by posting it to sites like Digg and Reddit to be shared with all. Don’t look now Larry but you’ve just spread your neck tie store all over social media sites that—if your content is truly engaging—is being linked to all over the internet! Bravo Larry, bravo.

Don’t forget that external links aren’t the only thing to worry about when link building. If you want people to find your homepage and not another page on your site you will want to make sure that all your other pages link back to the homepage. This shows the search engines that the flow of traffic is going to a particular page and they should consider it the flagship page of the site.

With the help of compelling content and a little leg work you can manufacture credibility that soon builds on itself. Not only does your website become more visible in search results, but it also continues to direct referral traffic your way through the avenues that you have put in place. Tomorrow we will discuss the importance of choosing a domain and the impact your choice can have on the keywords your site ranks well for.