Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Using Social Networks for Branding and Increased Traffic

Social networking is a unique tool that is bringing people together for social and business interaction.  Networking sites have also become a valuable SEO tool as it offers a variety of portals for you to advertise your company, what it can offer and gain valuable search engine credibility by staying trustworthy and maintaining a legitimate public profile.  

Networking sites are a free and effective way to drive traffic to your website.  By creating profiles on various networking sites you are able to put your business out there to be seen my millions and potentially send new business your way.  

When people browse the networking sites they do it in very similar ways as they do on Google or Yahoo.  They type in specific keywords to find what they’re looking for.  Implementing basic SEO strategies when putting your profile on these sites is a valuable tool for people and search engines to be able to find you.

When getting involved with social networking sites it is important to not only put your information on there but to be involved with what the site offers.  A lot of these sites are blog sites where you can get involved in discussions pertaining to your business.  The more you are involved and the more blogs you post the better chance you have of the search engines picking it up and increasing your positions in the rankings.

Be very wary of spamming.  Posting keyword stuffed blogs and irrelevant articles all over the place will cause the search engines to devalue your content and drop it from valuable ranking spots.  Make sure you post content that is valuable and important to your reader.  This should not be a hard thing to do if you are running an honest business and have a genuine belief in the goods or service you are providing.  

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.  Well, hopefully you don’t have too many enemies but when participating in social networking sites it’s important to maintain a positive image as “bad press” goes a long way.  If you are encouraging inappropriate activity or being a general nuisance on these networking sites it’s very easy to build up a lot of negative comments.  These bad remarks will not only tarnish your companies name and good standing but the search engines are very aware when negative comments are out there and if in abundance they will rank very high when people do searches around your important keywords or company name.  

By being actively involved in these networking sites not only promotes your business and helps with search engine rankings but allows you to interact with others in the same industry and can be a great tool for gathering information when doing research.  Honesty and integrity will go a long way in keeping your site at the top of the searches and keep you in good standing with the most important client of all….your customer.

Posted via web from sdn's posterous

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