A while ago I posted a widely discussed article on indirect promotion on how to grow your site power by building links to pages linking to it. XMCP posted a great piece on how to make the most of your social media profile in terms of link juice. A few key notes (I am omitting his “blackhat fun” focusing here merely on white techniques):
- most social media networks allow you to post a link back to your site on your profile page, so if you do your homework well, you will get a good solid page linking to whatever you prefer it to;
- besides building external links to your profile page (which is time consuming), you can also build the power of your profile page with the help of internal link juice by being (moderately) active at a social media community. For example, by voting for (or commenting at) a popular story at Digg, you get a link to your profile from “Who Dugg it” tab (a story page) and most Digg popular stories obtain solid external and internal link juice that will thus (partially) be transferred to your profile page.
Planning this strategy will both save your time and give you another link juice resource.
1. Always pay attention to the site internal nofollow usage. Your efforts may fall short if you spend time building internal links that pass no weight. I recommend using a FireFox plugin that line through all nofollowed links (e.g. SEOQuake or SearchStatus).
2. Make sure your link will be visible to search engines. Mixx, for example, shows “recently voted” to logged-in users and “related stories” to both external visitors and search crawlers.
3. Make sure pages you want to link to your profile are not blocked by robots.txt file:
4. Remember that your social media profile may also help you with your reputation management, so promote it wisely (choose the right username, do not spam, mind your comments, etc):
5. If you build links externally, make sure to choose the right profile URL. I myself did this mistake linking to my Flickr photostream page (/photos/XXX/) instead of my profile page (/people/XXX/). Why was that important? Flickr only allows links from your profile page; so the photostream page is mostly useless.
And now a short note for all of my dear readers who are going to criticize me for teaching how to manipulate social media. Please mind, I do not encourage you to spam or abuse. What I do encourage you is to make the most of your favorite social media community profile page. After all, if you are a regular valuable community contributor, you do have the right to get some personal benefit from it…
