pro tip #3: social media

Google doesn’t decide PageRank for your articles just by processing the content of what you’ve written and how your site presents it. It relies mostly on the opinion of the whole Internet to calculate your PageRank; and it measures the opinion of the Internet by looking at inbound links to your site from other sites. It assumes that if people are linking to you in a meaningful way, that you must be relevant.

So pro tip #3 is about using social media to get meaningful inbound links:

• Explore link-sharing sites like Digg.com, StumbleUpon.com, and Reddit.com. These sites are specifically designed for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. People post links to stories they think others will be interested in. The site visitors then vote on the stories they like and (theoretically) the best stories rise to the top or “go popular,” which can result in MAJOR exposure for your link. Because popular stories syndicate out and get picked up by other venues on the web. Even just submitting your stories to these kinds of content sharing sites, whether the stories go popular or not, definitely improves your SEO findability. However… (see the cautionary bullet below)
• There are some cardinal rules for using content sharing sites like Digg and StumbleUpon. Before you post ANYTHING, spend some time getting familiar with the site and how people interact on it. These sites are all about community and behaving yourself within the community. No one minds if you occasionally post your own links – provided that you’re participating in the community, voting on other stories that aren’t your own, posting stories that aren’t your own, commenting on stories, etc. If you try to use these sites solely for self-promotion and don’t participate, you will quickly be labeled as a spammer and nothing you post will ever go popular.
• Identify major sites that are thematically similar to your blog. Join those sites and become a part of their message-board/comment area communities. Most boards/comments allow you to have a user-name that sometimes can function as a link back to your site. If you participate in site discussions, it will give you credibility in the community and people might start clicking back through your links. If you become enough of a fixture on these sites, you can even start posting links to your own posts without annoying people.
• Once you’ve found larger sites that are similar to yours, start looking for arenas where you can post links to your own blog content. For example, the Internet Movie Database has a “links of the day” section at the bottom of their front page and they encourage people to submit stories about movies for consideration. Another example is Amazon.com. They have a robust thematically-organized messageboard system. If you post a link in their Science Fiction board community, that link syndicates out to every Amazon book page that’s been tagged as “science fiction.” Go to sites you like, that fit with your blog, and see if you can find these avenues to promote your links.
• Use sites like Google Trends to show you what people are searching on. If it’s appropriate, you can start tailoring your content to match popular search trends. However, if there’s nothing that seems to be an organic fit for your blog, don’t bother. If you try to force content onto your blog just to pander to users, it almost never works. But if you like writing about health and you see “swine flu” is an insanely popular term, it wouldn’t be out of character for you to discuss it.
• Social media loves lists. Don’t know why, but messageboards, Facebook, content sharing sites like Digg… they all love lists. 10 Reasons You Shouldn’t Be Afraid of the Swine Flu, 20 Best Post-Apocalyptic Movies, 5 Ways to Can Bake Better Cupcakes – posts structured like that are extremely popular on social media and with search engines. If you really wanted to tailor some blog content specifically to appeal to social media, lists would be a good place to start.
• The thing about social media is that it can’t be a one-way street. If you want Digg to drive you traffic, you have to participate on the site, so people will click your link. If you want Twitter to drive traffic, you have to Tweet and respond to people who Tweet you. If you start a Facebook page to drive traffic, you have to friend people, post content, etc. There is only so much you can do with automated feeds. With social media marketing, there has to be give and take and participation in larger communities, which – here’s the downside – can take a lot of time.