At the intersection of search and social is a confluence of opportunity.
If you have a plethora of social media profiles, take the time to leverage them to provide maximum efficiency for your site. Here’s some tips to get you started.
Not all social media profiles are created equal. Some profiles nofollow outbound links, some nofollow links until your reach a certain level of participation and some give fully followed links.
LinkedIn: You have the opportunity to show 3 outbound links to websites from your profile. The default choices are to use anchor text like “My Website” or “My Blog”. A better idea is to change those by choosing “other” and then typing in a better choice. In the end, it’s mostly window dressing, the links are bounced through an internal redirect that then does a temporary 302 redirect to your site.
So why bother? LinkedIn gets a ton of traffic and people looking for you and/or your site will be better served by better anchor text.
Twitter: The link at your twitter profile is nofollowed. But there is another side to this one. First, your twitter profile is at least as powerful as your LinkedIn profile, so you’re crazy not to put your website link in your profile. Second, your link is also part of the data which is available through the API. That means that there’s a zillion other tools and sites that might pick it up and use it somewhere else.
Facebook: Outbound links are nofollowed. All the same logic in the Twitter reasoning applies here as well.
My friend Jay Dolan reminded me about a great place for a followed link, your YouTube channel page. You can add it under your profile section.
How about when you leave the big 3 (or 4)? There are lots of slightly smaller places that allow you to enter your url and give it a full follow.
Meetup.com: In my opinion, it’s one of the best places to get a high quality, followed link back to your site, especially if you get one from the front page of a popular meetup group. If you are a member of a group, make sure you add your site’s url to your meetup profile page – those links are followed and pass a good amount of link juice.
seomoz.org: You may not be familiar with seomoz if you’re not a search geek, but the way they do links is becoming more and more accepted. If you become a major contributor, they will remove the nofollow from your link on your profile page. That link would have a lot of juice to pass back to your site, but you have to put in the work.
Tri-Out: Nice followed links if your business has that information entered. The Pit has a profile filled out as full as possible.
Yelp: If you have a Yelp profile, you have the opportunity to add your url, but it is redirected in a way that offers zero SEO help, but because Yelp sees so much traffic, it’s still worth adding the link.
Google: I originally forgot about this one, but it’s a good one. If you have a Google account, you can also add your url to that profile. If you’re active in the Google forums you can get a good amount of click-throughs.
Did I forget any?
Peloton photo by: The Old Penfold
Jay Dolan says
YouTube! It’s one of the most popular search sites, and your profile can display a link as well as any video descriptions you have. I imagine they follow the same rules as Twitter and Facebook.
Phil Buckley says
Great point Jay, I’m going to add YouTube to the list.
Joanna Wolfe says
What about Flicker? And to a lesser extent, Vimeo (certainly outweighed by YouTube)