The other week I joined MeetUp.com, the online event, local and “meeting up” social networking site, in an effort to meet other bloggers, search marketers, web developers and restaurant snobs in the Tampa area.
I moved to Tampa, Florida last month and SEJ contributor Rhea Drysdale suggested MeetUp as a local networking tool.
So, I registered with the site, built my profiles, and joined a handful of groups. For each specific MeetUp group you build an original profile page, so I have a different profile page with information about me for Tampa Bloggers than I do for Tampa Mountain Bikers.
I was performing a vanity search on Google yesterday and saw the usual highly ranked profile pages for MyBlogLog and Yahoo 360, also good places to build links.
But was surprised to see this Tampa Blogger profile listed as #10 for my name.
In the profile there is a section to place an external link to your own web site and get this, the link is not NoFollow. Additionally, the link lets you use your favorite Anchor Text, which is useful for Google based SEO.
Sure the profile pages do not have high Google PageRank, but that argument is obsolete since the MeetUp site is a high authority site and full of original content. Just the fact alone that my MeetUp profiles are ranking on the top two result pages on Google after a week over 128,000 other results for “loren baker” is proof that these pages are valuable.
By including MeetUp as part of your reputation management and link building strategy, your profile can rank highly for your name and if you join 20 or 30 groups, you won’t only have 30 new anchor text rich authority backlinks indexed among the major search engines helping with your ranking, but you’re sure to meet some like minded people at the same time.
