Submitting to Social Media Sites for Successful Link Bait

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Ann Smarty

12/11/08

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In his recent post at SEOmoz, Tom mentioned submitting to (niche) social media sites as an important step of any link bait (once you get past your link bait roadblock):

• you get links from social media sites (which is good in any case);
• you get attention of the community of people who are interested particularly in your topic (which means more comments and new loyal readers);
• you get more links (if you are lucky and smart enough) from people frequenting those social sites;
• you get more social media connections (outside SEO niche) which means more help in the future.

So how to actually do it in order not to screw any of the above points? The answer is simple: do it right. By just spamming all you will achieve is #1 above (provided your submission is not deleted as spam). Take time investigating the community and contributing to it.

Social networks that grow around user submissions can be divided into two groups: social bookmarking and social voting sites.

Social bookmarking is all about sharing. What you need to make sure here is:

• Proper tagging: do your homework and investigate how other (similar) stories are tagges at each site. Picking the right relevant and popular tags is crucial if you want your submission to be found.
• Social bookmarking site structure: oftentimes these sites content is only available after login or offers no way for Google to index its users profiles and submissions. So if you are there only for links, you won’t achieve a lot.

Social voting is all about popularity. Stories get noticed only if they reach the front page. What you need to succeed there:

• Become a power user or make a connection with a power user. That’s the law of every social media site, you need to work hard to get noticed there.
• Participate: comment at others’ submissions, submit your friends’ stories, add members to friends, complete your profile (don’t forget about the profile picture) and send (to-the-point) messages to other members.

Now, how to find those networks and sites?

• Take advantage of awesome lists compiled by someone else:
  • 125 social bookmarking sites : importance of user generated tags, votes and links;
  • Jane’s list of most useful social media sites;
  • Social bookmarking list: over 120 sites with Page Rank;
  • Categorized list of social media and social networking sites;
  • 40+ social news websites with awesome commentary;
  • 20 do-follow social bookmarking sites that actually work (and how to bookmark QUICKLY);
  • 22 sofollow social media sites offering profile links.
• Do your own search:
  • Here is a directory of niche social bookmarking sites sorted by category and popularity. Some of them do not use direct (or “do-follow”) links for submissions, but it is still a good way to attract targeted audience.
  • You can find even more sites powered by Pligg by running a quick search at Yahoo: [link:http://www.pligg.com/ keyword] and [link:http://pligg.com/ keyword]
  • Check out Pligg forum to find more emerging social bookmarking sites.