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Social media: building your presence through web communities

Social media optimisation can run alongside other SEO activity to connect your website to suitable online communities. It is all about encouraging web users to recommend your site to their friends and associates.

What are social media websites?

Social media websites let people share information about a wide range of interests. They can be your quickest way to online fame because they can send thousands of visitors to your website in a matter of a few hours of your site being mentioned.

Social media websites - such as LinkedIn (used by many business users across numerous sectors), Friendster and MySpace - not only send plenty of traffic to your site, they also help you improve your search engine rankings because most search engine ranking algorithms attach greater relevance to websites that are linked to by other websites. Indeed, many businesses are being built around social media marketing campaigns.

Another type of site along the same lines are social bookmarking websites. These allow users to share their favourite links with each other. Users can organise hundreds of links under various tags (categories), so when people search for terms that match the tags associated with your site, you will appear in the search result pages. A few examples of well-known social bookmarking websites are Digg, Del.icio.us, Netvibes, Technorati, StumbleUpon and Netscape.

A great thing about social bookmarking websites is that they allow their users to rank various links. So the popularity of your links increases as more and more people give a 'thumbs up' to them. Once your link gets popular on one social bookmarking website, it soon begins to appear on other websites too. You can imagine how valuable those inbound links can be for your SEO efforts.

Getting more from social media

Although there are different views among SEO experts about how to make the most of social media marketing perhaps the main issues are as follows:

1. Focus on great content. People that visit social media websites are looking for great content, and they will only tell others about your site if it contains content of interest. So think about what will get the users of these sites interested in your own site. It's best if you can create content such as white papers or 'how to' guides that are of great value and not available elsewhere. Setting up your own blog, if done well, will also help to attract people.
2. Get networking. You can't just sit back and expect people to flock to your site. Make a name for yourself by actively participating on forums on relevant social media websites, blogs and wherever you feel the people you want to attract are active. Make valuable contributions: the more gregarious you are on the internet, the better are the chances of gaining relevant exposure for your website.
3. Make it easy for people to 'tag' or 'bookmark' you. Adding buttons like 'add to del.icio.us' or 'Digg This' makes it easy for visitors to add your page to their favourite social media site.
4. Reward inbound links. If someone links to you site from a social media website, consider mentioning them on your site too. It's just good manners really, but it certainly helps to build your profile.
5. Make your content portable. Submit things like video clips to other sites to further spread your web presence.

An established web feature that's growing fast

Social media has always been a part of the web. Since the very early days, users have been communicating with people who share their interests. It's growing all the time and so it should almost certainly form a part of your online marketing strategy. This article has been written as a brief introduction to the subject so read up on social media in more detail or get some specialist advice if you want to go beyond the basics.

Find out more...

Doublespark often helps our clients to build and implement their social media strategy. It's an important tool in the process of generating traffic to their sites by moving up the search engine result rankings. Please contact us to discuss what we could do for you, or get some additional useful information through these links:

Full list of SEO resources within the knowledge centre:

1. SEO explained
2. Social Media
3. SEO keyword research and analysis
4. Competitor research and analysis
5. Reporting and analysis
6. SEO Scorecard