6 Tips: How I do "social"!

If you've been reading alot on SEO for last two years, you often see people write "be social" or "send social signals".

I concentrate on large niche sites, here's how I do it for new & existing sites:

1. Register Main Accounts for the Website on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Feedburner and Youtube. I link to these from the Website. Do not use no-follow.

Every time I add new content on the Website I post them to these three accounts. It's worthwhile to manually craft the descriptions to go along with these postings. But using automation tools such as the various wordpress plugins available to auto-post will probably save time and effort.

With Youtube, it might be hard to develop meaningful video content for certain niches. Don't just post screenshots of your webpages. For tough topics, you could just hire a presenter to talk on screen about various subjects in your niche. You can find people willing to do this on fiverr and odesk. Mix it up with nice graphics, HD, etc and you've got yourself a great video that will attract youtube subscribers and comments.


2. Register accounts at Friendfeed, Pinterest, and Flickr. For these I don't link to them from the website.

Friendfeed is great. You can add your RSS feed, and feeds for all other services you are creating here including youtube, flickr, twitter, etc. Once you add these external services, they update the stream on friendfeed with whatever has been posted on those services.

For Flickr and Pinterest, I usually post any custom made graphics used on the site. Things like Infographics for example - you post them and include a link back to your site on every one.

Depending on your site and niche, you might want to mix up which social sites are main accounts and which are not.

3. Interlink!

-Register for an account at Knowem.com. You should register as individual and include a link to your website in the profile. Remember to include niche related tags which already exist on the site. This is how the link juice will flow to you.

Knowem lets you find and link your accounts on other social sites. So linkup all the accounts you've created so far in steps 1 & 2 and also in the steps below.

When guest posting, you're usually allowed two or more links. Instead of linking to your website and let's say your twitter, you link to your website and your knowem profile instead.

-Also Wherever possible - interlink your social accounts. For example on your Google+ and Youtube Channel, you link to your twitter and facebook and vice-versa.


4. Submit your site to Technorati and and the relevant Alltop page. If your site is quality, they will quickly review and accept it within 1 week.

Remember to link to your Technorati page on Knownem.

Alltop is especially good. For certain niches, many sites display the content from alltop - giving you even more backlinks and exposure.

With alltop, do not use your feedburner feed when submitting your site. Use the standard wordpress feed so you get direct links to your site rather than feedburner redirects.

So that means avoiding the feedburner feedsmith plugin if you use wordpress. You will have to manually edit your theme to find traces of the standard wordpress rss, and manually insert your feedburner rss instead.


5. Social Bookmarking. No it's not dead, not if you do it without going overboard.

I usually maintain accounts on the following SB sites:

Digg
Stumbleupon
Reddit

Delicious
Diigo
Jumptags
Mister Wong (not free)
A1 Webmarks

On the first three, I only post my very best link worthy content in addition to other related content from OTHER sites I find interesting.

On the rest, I post and bookmark every new post and article with unique descriptions. On these sites, it's important to tag your bookmarks appropriately and to make use of the extra features they offer. For example on Diigo, there's "lists" which all the automated programs ignore.

All these accounts can and should be linked up with your knowem profile.

6. Finally, you of course make use of the social buttons and widgets on your website. Each article should have sharing tools. Display the widgets to show first-time visitors there is an active community around your site.

Probably 80% of all these sites use nofollow tags on their outgoing links. Don't let that put you off. I've had sites rank well for scores of keywords with just this alone and a handful of good backlinks to the homepage.

Even if there wasn't a huge incentive here to gain SEO value, you still gain traffic from these sources. For many of my sites, social sources are in the double digital percentages.

Interested to see how other people do "social".