Optimizing Your Story for Links From Social Media
November 6, 2007 by Pablo Palatnik
(I guess the title of this post should be Optimizing your story to get links from your social media campaign.)
Social media marketing has become a great tool for two reasons; traffic and links. We all know that. I personally think getting those links is more important than getting two or three days of traffic that means absolutely nothing, except a bunch of people reading what you wrote which is great, but it’s more important to keep the long-term goal in mind.
As online marketers, I’m sure all of us use similar tactics to get votes to the story as quick as possible which entails IMing and e-Mailing everyone you know to vote. Maybe too often, an I’m probably guilty (but that’s also cause I think my stories are cool and interesting =).)
What you should keep in mind when writing the story for submission is how (if I get to the top) will I get links? It’s all about content…in social media, more than SEO, content really is king. You want quality links? Write quality content. No quality website will link to you if you’re writing something that is lacking in content, misspelled (which I do a lot of, grammar issues, etc.)
Now you got to the front page of Digg or any other major social media site. Links are sure to come, but is your post or site optimized? I’ve seen people make the mistake of submitting website articles without having keywords in their title or just plain not an optimized site.
Be sure to have your site optimized in case the story becomes popular and sites start linking to it. They will use keywords in your story and you can help them decide the anchor text by title, and having that keyword density in your post.
Take for example my story that was made popular on Digg a few months back. It was a skateboarding video I posted from YouTube on one of my websites but didn’t have a title. I added the title right when I saw the post was going to get popular so I added one keyword, “skateboarding wipeouts†(btw, the site is www.RokBottomCo.com) and you can type in Google, “skateboarding wipeouts.â€
4th position in Google and 4th position in Yahoo. I could follow my own advice and write a bit more on the site to make it more content rich and add a bit more KW density to reach that 1st position. Video is content as well…as we see many video’s reach to the top of social sites and get as many links as stories do.
Optimize your articles/post…once you get those links, you’ll be glad you did.
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Comments (3)
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This method has worked for me with very obscure keywords. I havent yet made the first page of any big social media website but it has payed of to submit to them.