Can You Improve Organic Rankings With Social Media Links?

Many clients I work with understand the importance of link building and the effect it has on organic rankings and traffic. However, most clients, for a variety of reasons, aren’t willing to consider social media as link building tactic. They feel that it’s not worth the time investment, and the quantity and quality of links don’t result in ranking changes or increased traffic. For this article I’ll offer some tips on how you can improve and maximize these link building efforts to boost your rankings.

How to improve your link building efforts:

• Social media links (when not part of a larger strategy) are most effective for mid to long tail keywords. The head keywords were dominated by bigger brand domains with more domain trust and inbound links.
• Getting your most desirable keywords into the Digg title is crucial since subsequent links will use it as for the anchor text.
• Links and rankings gained from social media “stick”.

Ways that you can improve the end results of your efforts:

• The title of your submission has a very high likely hood of becoming your inbound anchor text. You should either submit the story yourself or ask sympathetic, friendly colleagues to do it for you.
• If you are trying to rank for a very competitive or “head” keyword, it will require a single very successful story or multiple stories pooled together. Plan out a multi-month, multi-part story strategy. After several moderate successes, consolidate all the parts into one larger story and use a 301 redirect to transfer and consolidate all of the inbound links into that single location. Don’t approach it as a “bait and switch” tactic. Instead look for ways to integrate and improve all of the information under one URL. Altering or significantly changing the content would be a questionable tactic; updating and improving it isn’t as likely to be seen this way.
• Don’t ignore the benefit of having a second listing from the social media site itself. While the title and description should be commercial free to have the higher chance of succeeding, having a second listing will ultimately result in more traffic.