Dominating the Search Engines with Social Media Networks

With the advent of Stompernet’s SMARTS program, Howie Schwartz’s Conversation Domination and Jack Humphrey’s Authority Black Book, leveraging the power of Web 2.0 / Social Media has "officially" gone mainstream.

As you know, I’ve used Web 2.0 for quite some time and a while back I created a "flow chart" to explain how I actually use Web 2.0 (in the ‘one’ forum I participate in on a regular basis). So I thought I’d share it with you as well.

Hopefully, you’re already familiar with Social Media sites on some level… from free Blogging platforms such as Blogger.com and Wordpress.com (which started this "revolution"); to Social Networking Sites like MySpace and FaceBook; to Content Sharing Sites, like EzineArticles, Squidoo and HubPages, and Social Bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us, Reddit, Digg, Propeller, Stumbleupon etc. (some would argue that Digg, Propeller, Stumbleupon and similar sites are Social Voting sites).

So, what’s the big deal about social media?

I personally think that the main benefit to these properties is that they contribute to "organic" traffic that is not dependent on Search Engine Results. In addition, you also get to take advantage of the sites’ authority, which means more search engine traffic and more backlinks to your site (depending on whether they use "dofollow" or not). In other words, there are two parts to the Social Media equation: Social Media Traffic Generation and Social Media Linking.

So, you might be wondering, what’s the advantage of using sites like Blogger, Hubpages, Squidoo and Wordpress.com?

All of these are considered authority sites and can rank very well in the search engines provided you build them "properly" and more importantly add some new content to them on a "regular" basis.

In terms of Blogger, they have a lot of pull with Google Blog Search as well as organic search engines and if you create the "right" type of content, you can rank on the first page of Google almost immediately (depending on competition of course). It is also very user friendly in terms of setup, ad integration (particularly Adsense), and is quite easy to "tweak". The downside of building blogs with Blogger is that Blogger controls your site… and they are often very "delete" happy (I’ve had a couple of dozen blogs deleted by them…).

As for Wordpress.com… they are similar to Blogger in that you host your blog with them (except they don’t in my experience have the habit of deleting blogs like Blogger). Their interface is easy to use and ranks well in the search engines. The upside of Wordpress is that they have an active user community that likes to read other people’s blogs… and you can get quite a bit of free traffic just from using "tags" in your posts. However, they are not very user friendly with Ad integration and if you’re not careful, you could be in breach of their TOS.

Which one do I start with, and is one better than another?

Squidoo and Hubpages can both drive quite a bit of traffic and they both use "do follow" in their links, which means you can leverage these sites to drive traffic to your "money site(s)" much in the same way you would use EzineArticles (or other article directories). The pages you build on these properties are also better suited for a more narrow niche (or product), rather than broad niches.

Blogger and Wordpress.com are "traditional" blogs and is a great resource for posting either snippets of articles from your money sites, or independent articles with anchor text links embedded in the article pointing to a particular page on your money site.

I generally use all of these properties to support my main money site, whether it’s an opt-in page, sales page, content site…

There are obviously no "rules" as to how you use leverage Web 2.0. I personally use them to build a "mini net" of properties to "dominate" a niche term… and funnel traffic and link power to my money sites. So, you could potentially set up something like this:

NOTE: This is just an illustration of how you can setup one type of a mini net and the sites listed are just some of the sites I may use.

As you can see, the chart flows from the "less" important web 2.0 properties down to Blogger / Wordpress.

The most important thing to know is that you should not get stuck in a pattern. In other words, you can for instance switch the positions of Blogger / Wordpress with Squidoo / Hubpages or other "authority sites" and gain similar (or better results).

Let’s talk about some of the biggest mistakes people make when creating these networks:

1. Try to focus on too many keyword phrases at once
2. Give up after creating one blog /lens / hub for one topic
3. Not bookmarking ALL content (be sure to use different bookmarking sites for different sites)
4. Trying to use just ONE account for bookmarking / blog creation (I would personally recommend that you open multiple accounts, ten or preferably more, with each service to avoid footprints and patterns).
5. Using reciprocal links between different properties

One of the biggest "secrets" to success with this tactics, is to actually create multiple pages spread across you network for just ONE long-tail keyword phrase. In other words, the whole network above should be for ONE phrase. Then you rinse and repeat for the next keyword phrase.

Also, learn to use and publish your RSS feeds. This will save you A LOT of time when updating your web 2.0 properties.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences on the topic…

To your success