by Jonathon Blakeley
Off page SEO amounts to link building and link analysis. By using google analytics or yahoo site explorer one can ascertain where referral links come from. Then by visiting those referral sites one can determine the nature of the link and whether any useful keywords are included on that link. The worst sin in SEO is the “click here” link. It has no merit what so ever. Having a company name as the anchor can be equally useless. Type of referral backlinks:
- Social Bookmarking
- Article Distribution
- Press Releases
- Blog Commenting
- RSS Feeds
- Guest Blogging
- Videos
Social Bookmarking
Like them or not social networking sites such as facebook, myspace and so on have changed the internet. Twitter and Facebook have more html pages and backlinks than any other. If you can get links without going through the search engines then great. Why because when people search on the search engines we see all the competition as well. Whereas on a social networking site, that link is that bit more a qualified link. Thus it can carry more credibility and stickiness.
Each social networking site has its own particular niche.
- Facebook 10-50
- Myspace – musicans/artists
- Bebo – Youth
- Stumbleupon – curious
- Twitter – Jornalists, researcher and activist
- IRC – hackers
- Delicious – social bookmarking
- You tube – sharing video content
The key to social book marking is understanding your demographic, then having buttons on your site that allow your website to be bookmarked by your target market. Social bookmarking is when users save to links to a webpage rather than locally on their machine. These web pages are usually shared with others. The more a website is bookmarked the higher its rankings. This differs significantly from search engine results which rank sites on back links and on page SEO.
Google +1
In effect that is what Google has tried to do with the +1 system. A kind of social bookmarking of their own. It is obvious that they have seen the advantages of social bookmaking as a way of ranking sites. Now they are trying to integrate it with their existing algorithms to fine tune their search results. Good luck to them I say we need some decent alternative to Facebook.
Social networking abuses
Because of the size and power of the social networks they can have a very beneficial effect for websites, equally they can have a negative effect too. The danger is a customer or client has a bad experience and lets rip on a social networking site about how rubbish your company is. The worst thing one can do is to respond, trying to get abusive comments or a diatribe removed can be very very difficult if to impossible. So what do you do?
Isn’t it just safer to stay away from social networking?
Well the best approach is risk prevention with social networking. Put good security in place. Have a unique password for very social networking site you use. Because if your password is fished it is an easy matter to access all your other web services. Secondly, some sites such as facebook are much more open to abuse than say twitter. Facebook stores everything, fortunately twitter has too many tweets and it is hard to locate older tweets, so they disappear into the twitter subconscious, gone but not quite forgotten. http://www.twimemachine.com/ allows you to journey back into your twitter subconscious.
