Are you a Marketing Sheep? 261 Questions.
How do you SEO a social network?
The answer is that it's just like SEOing any other site. You create lots of relevant content that's full of keywords. You have lots of sites with relevant information link back to you. You make sure that your title tags and headings contain helpful keywords.
The problem is that you aren't in control of the content on your site. Flock marketers like to be in control.
While you can blog and write articles all day long, you're best success will be in getting others to do the SEO work for you.
Get people to contribute. You've got to build your social network around some activity that gets people coming back. The output of that activity is often text: text posts, text comments, text rants, text descriptions, text reviews, etc. Get your community writing.
Get people to link back. Provide what I call "code generators." Code generators automatically produce the HTML or JavaScript needed for visitors to add a link to their profile to other sites, like their blog, MySpace profile, Facebook profile, Web site (does anyone even have one of these anymore?), etc.
Bring your content to the Homepage. While it's equally as valid for you to bring organic search traffic to a landing page on a SocNet as it is a Web site--most of your community's "landing pages" are going to be their profiles--your homepage can take advantage of this community-generated content. Bring the "most recent posts" or "most popular posts" to the front page of your network.
That's three and that's enough for now... but there'll be more.
Photo courtesy lusi.
Great post, Brian :)
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