The Low Down On Social Media Links
You probably already know that you need to build links to your website and product pages if you want them to rank well, so the more links you obtain from authoritative domains, the better. The catch is that social media links have their disadvantages. Firstly, you can’t manage the anchor text and secondly, it can be hard to find links that aren’t ‘no follow’ or redirects that won’t pass on link juice. This may make social media links sound less attractive for search engine optimisation, but they can be incredibly useful.Trust VS. Link Juice
Google spends a lot of time researching the best ways to get the most appropriate results for any search terms their users get the best experience out of using the search engine. So, when links are shared through social media profiles, Google puts a lot of emphasis on this when measuring the relevancy of a page. In other words, whilst these links may not pass on any ‘link juice’ or information, they do pass on trust.
By themselves, these links:
- Will arrive from individual profiles that don’t have a lot of authority of their own
- Won’t have targeted anchor text
- Might have ‘nofollow’ attributes and/or redirects that aren’t very valuable
However, if you obtain hundreds of them, Google takes this into account and sees that your website is very important among individuals and reflects this in the organic search engine rankings but how do you go about receiving hundreds of social media back links?
Social News Promotion and SEO
Whilst several social networks are used for interacting, there are those that are geared more toward sharing content such as Digg, StumbleUpon, and Reddit, to name a few. These are the type of social sites you want to aim for when building social links. After the content is suggested to one of these sites, users can vote it up or down. As soon as a user votes it up, it generates a link on that user’s profile page. Result!
If a sufficient number of users vote for a piece of content, it becomes visible on the home page. Both Digg and Reddit have a pagerank of eight so if you were to get a link back from either of these, you would gain trust, in Google’s eyes, from an already highly trusted website. Then there is all the traffic that will follow through to your website from this link which typically leads to other residual links, from bloggers and tweets.
The Aftermath Of Social Links
So you’ve made some content viral, and you have a lot of social links. What has that done for your products pages or rankings in competitive terms? For starters, you have created a supplementary page on your site with conviction and authority. For example, a virally successful piece of content will frequently obtain a page rank of 2 to 4 in a few months of going viral. This does two things for your site.
- It gives your domain more power within the search engines which means your other optimised pages will rank better.
- You have formed an opportunity to better interlink your site and squeeze it out more efficiently. In fact, when your content page has amassed some authority, you can then link to one of your products pages from it, and send some of that juice over.
So, now that you get how a social content site can be used to reinforce your SEO, the question is how do you truly leverage them?
If Content Is The King, Context Is The Church
There are two important things you will need to pull off for a successful social content push.
- A refined content plan: The first step is integrating your branded content with requests from social content users. There are loads of different content formats that you could use for creating general original content but it’s best to stick to creating niche content for relevant related websites. Once you have an idea of the type of content you will produce, research what social content sites it will best suit. This will free your focus on your content promotion efforts and allow you to achieve better results.
- Get access to a list of power accounts that are relevant to your content as these accounts are trusted by the social content site’s algorithms due to age, contact and follower count. Votes from these accounts have a tendency to bring more weight to your link but another advantage is contacts and followers of this account are likely to vote your content up just by seeing it on said power account.
However, generating a power account isn’t easy so you will either have to take the time (about a year) to construct them up, or you will have to associate with someone who already has access to some.
Social SEO
We know that social media proposes a diversity of ways to communicate with the user. For example, suggestions and Facebook ads let us target users with certain interests and demographics. It can also be used to target users away from their social networks, after they’ve seen your ad and navigated away from the social site and onto your website.