I decided to make a quick post on how beneficial I have found leveraging social media sites for hard backlinks. We all know how beneficial social media sites can be when launching a viral campaign or link baiting article. Social media sites are also useful for external links to your website too, as long as you do it right. I have tested again and again, and social media site backlinks are increasingly becoming more valuable in Google and other search engines.

There are a few quick pointers you could use to quickly and easily get more backlinks from social media sites. The first thing to consider is whether your site is general enough to be listed in nearly all of the social news sites, or if it is a tight niche you are promoting and you want to keep the links relevant. Even if your article or site is a certain topic, don’t hesitate to still submit it to main social news sites. A link from Propeller, Digg and a myspace blog does more than you’d think it would, as generic as those sites are. I’d suggest heading over to check out over 80 social news sites by niche that was just updated yesterday by SquareOak.com for a very helpful and fresh list of social media sites.

The next thing you want to make sure is that you use your anchor text where possible on all of these social media sites. Whether it be a profile page, a bookmarklet page, or a submit page, this next step is very important. Since these social media sites have thousands and thousands of new pages a day, a large number of the pages sometimes don’t get indexed. For instance an example submit page for Digg would be here . A page like this may or may not get indexed, and especially may not if it doesn’t get hot on a particular site. This is why you will have to manually take care of the indexing.

This also goes for any other site submit page, or blog page (blogger, myspace, wordpress, squidoo, etc.) Just because you add your backlink doesn’t mean you will get credit for it. You need to make sure that the page your link is on is also indexed in all the major engines. There are multiple ways you could make sure these are indexed properly. One way of course is to interlink blogrolls and social networks with each other, and already indexed sites and pages in your existing network. Another quick way would be to use something like bookmarking demon or QUIT index tool to quickly get your authority sub pages indexed. In turn, your sites will get credit from the authority social news sites.

With so many social bookmarking and networking sites popping up everyday, there is an ever increasing opportunity for webmasters to gain powerful and related links quickly, easily and free. The days of submitting a PR to prweb.com and ezinearticles.com and hoping for the best are coming to an end - and the world of web 2.0 is quickly opening doors for more advanced search engine optimization techniques and methods.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 10th, 2007 at 3:55 am and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.