A lot has been written about using social media as a means of smoothly using social media as an engagement tool for contacting webmasters for links. In this article, I have documented the ways in which I use Twitter for natural, best practice SEO which has other benefits than just link love – appealing to social signals, brand building through social media buzz and future proofing your SEO efforts.
With any social media interaction for a specific industry type, my tip would be to create a brand new social media profile. This organises your work/home life from the business in question and allows you to tailor your bio and avatar to make a highly relevant first impression when you are in the early stages of creating following. Also, when you are reading tweets, replying, retweeting with this profile you are learning more about the space you are doing SEO within. If you are an SEO agency or consultant, this type of genuine knowledge is power.
Take your time when building up a new Twitter profile. If you have no Photoshop skills, then pick out a web color reference from your avatar and go for a tasteful plain background. Think carefully about your bio. As you will be going out to organisations and bloggers to make connections you need to be friendly and clear about your contribution to the online community. Make it fresh and punchy. You can also text different bios – the call to action of ‘I’ll follow you back’ is worth a try. The reasons why you would consider doing this is that following to attract follow backs is almost like a new form of email marketing – when an email regarding a new follower drops into someone’s inbox that bio is your email copy.
Build up a following gradually, targeting people that are relevant to the industry sector. You can use RSS feeds from authority websites in the space for regular tweets (be careful to not be too spammy – but with Twitter there is more flexibility than Facebook for instance) and a handful of weekly unique tweets. With some of the recent Twitter updates, the follow suggestions are good – so use this as a means of following as many highly relevant people to the industry in question as possible.
Then, you have a list of people that may or may not have websites. Create a list within your Twitter profile of everyone that has a website. With any of these that have followed you back you have inventory potential where you can use Twitter’s direct messaging service for confidential 1-2-1 conversations for the arranging of links.
The rest in terms of link building principles is up to you – whether you want to be whiter than white or be more aggressive with financial incentives. Even without the contacting of webmasters, you can distribute your content directly to lots of highly relevant people in the space you are working in and it look neutral – more chance of creating retweets, replies and the ultimate goal of links.
Good luck – this post was bought to you by Duncan Colman on behalf of Outside the Box.
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