Saturday, January 17, 2009

How To Get Social Media Sites To Link To You

By Brian Armstrong

Using social bookmarking or social media websites is a relatively easy way to get traffic to your website. These resources can be used very successfully to not only help your website with getting direct traffic from these sites, but also help with getting your website into the search engines for the keywords you're going after.

The first thing to do is to compose your article, your blog post, or your web page. You can use any number of free websites to create your content. This is the first thing that needs to happen before you'll get the benefits of social networking for your site specifically. You can always start with other people's websites or web pages, but typically you'll get the most benefit by doing some of both.

There's a site you can use called socialmarker.com which will help you get started with social bookmarking. What this site does is allow you to quickly bookmark one article or blog entry on multiple sites. It frames each of the "add bookmark" pages then allows you to click and drag the same description, URL, and tags into each of the bookmarking sites. The first time you go to this site, if you haven't already, you'll need to add new accounts for the bookmarking sites you'd like to use.

The first thing you'll add is a title. This title should not only include the blog post title or article title, but should also include the main primary keyword phrase that you're trying to use to get rankings. If you can start with this as your title, you'll have a better chance of getting ranked for those keywords.

The description is another part of using socialmarker.com. Use this description as a strong call to action to get people to your website. You obviously don't want to deceive people into visiting by promising them something that isn't there, but make sure that in the description, you give a compelling reason for people to want to read more or find out more information.

The URL is your web address of the page you're bookmarking. Do NOT use only the domain name. Make sure you are using the actual web address of the specific page you're trying to get bookmarked. If you don't do this, you'll get errors on several of the sites complaining that you've already or someone has already bookmarked that domain or that main page.

Tags are another thing you'll be prompted for when bookmarking your sites. These tags are basically keywords, usually 1-2 word keyword phrases that can be used to identify relatively broadly the article or blog post. As tags, you should use both a main keyword phrase that you're trying to get ranked as well as some of the more broad keyword phrases that better represent what people on these social bookmarking sites will actually search for. These sites are a lot like a search engines that people use to find very relevant updated content on their search topics.

These social bookmarking sites are a great way to get relevant links back to your sites and depending on which ones you use will have a very high "authority" in the eyes of the search engines. These sites can also help you generate a significant amount of traffic all by themselves. The majority of these sites also allow you to create profiles in which you can usually add links to whatever site you want to as well which will also help with the search engines and your overall traffic strategy.

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