April 20th, 2010 by Nick

For your social media marketing plan to be a success, you must create worthy links that people will want to respond to. The best way of doing this is by trawling the social media sites and finding those that are relevant to your area of business.

One of the quickest ways to improve your online marketing is to add links in sites like Digg, Delicious and other well known bookmarking and news sites. Twitter is another useful link to add. Make sure you’ve got the outlink tabs well displayed on your web page – and that they link to something worth reading or watching. This part is slightly harder. You must compose unique and captivating content that will encourage people to follow you and rate you highly. Again, do your homework – browse around and see what content is on offer at other links. You’ll be surprised at how easy it is to make quality links. If you don’t feel up to making cleverly worded videos, try the academic approach and post links to “How to” articles on blogs you’ve written. Some people actually prefer reading text to watching videos.

Your SEO link building plan should never include spamming. If you start spamming the social media sites, your content will quickly be taken down. This is especially true of high-profile sites like Wikipedia and Digg. Self-promotion of your site should take place there, not outside. There is no point setting up a search engine optimisation management plan, if you create flame wars everywhere you go. Even places like MySpace are wary now – especially as spammers often carry destructive viruses and malware on their links. Be totally honest with your objectives, and it will do wonders for your SEO link building profile. Google follows external links closely – and rewards those who don’t misbehave with high rankings on Google searches.

As well as submitting links direct to the social media sites, make online friends and send PMs and emails as well. They will help spread the word – plus you could end up with some useful contacts. SEO link building doesn’t always come from the most obvious sources.

Don’t be despondent if your SEO link building strategies don’t work at once. It takes time to build trust online. Post in as many forums as you can, and keep dropping subtle hints among your peers, and pretty soon you’ll see the links building up.

It’s important that you don’t lose sight of search engine optimisation when you’re planning an SMM campaign. Social media optimisation is a great tool for building brand recognition and increasing the visibility of your site online – but it’s still the main search engines that get 70% of all search traffic. It’s best to look at SMO as one of your SEO tools – and one that must be used regularly. Don’t give up participating in the social media boards the moment your first batch of deep links is successful, or you’ll lose all credulity you may have gained, from both the search engines and the browsing public.

Search engine optimization and SMO are hard work – which is why so many people use specialised link building services to do it for them.

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