Backlinks In Social Media: Wasted Efforts Or Rank-Worthy Tactics?

If you’re a web business owner or a marketing professional nowadays, you probably use at least one social media site to try and leverage your own influence online. In fact, you may be using 3, 4, 5 or more social media channels to post links back to your hosted site to generate traffic and increase your ranking on search engines, especially the coveted Google ranking.

But how long are your links active? Are people on Facebook more responsive than Twitter to click on your company’s link? It’s often hard to tell but there are a few options and ideas out there to try and maximize your efforts.

A popular way to create a backlink to your site is to scout out blogs that you might feel have the same audience that you’re trying to build, comment on a post and leave a link to your site. This is a great way to create another link back to your page but remember, Google is smart. Google not only looks at how many pages/sites contain a link back to yours, but it also considers the content that is surrounding your link.

If your business’ site is about a specific subject, make sure you’re posting your link on a site similar or related to that subject. Otherwise, your backlink may just be dead on arrival. After you’ve commented and linked your page to the blog, post it on your Facebook or Twitter account to create a mutually beneficial relationship between you and the blogger.

Using apps to help you track your links on Facebook and Twitter is another great option to help you determine if your efforts are worthwhile. An app such as QuickTagger (http://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/tools/quicktagger) allows you to categorize where you want to post your links and does the posting and shortening of links for you. All of the data you’ll need to track the effectiveness of your posted link can then be monitored through Google Analytics. This can help you determine which social media channels are producing the most action for your backlink and help keep it active.

If you want your business’ site to succeed, a little extra work on the side may prove to have great payouts. Earlier in this article, commenting on blogs was mentioned as a tool to help produce more backlinks to your site and in turn increasing your ranking amongst search engines; the pitfall being lack of quality content. Creating your own blog (or two), allows you to have full control over the content and can post backlinks to your main web page as often as you’d like. Again, promoting these blogs that contain your links on Twitter and Facebook can all be tracked using an app such as InMotion Hosting’s QuickTagger to monitor efficiency.

Lastly, another way to create more permanent backlinks might be to take out an online ad that contains your site’s link. It’s more links back to your site which boosts those organic search rankings. Once the ad is up, promote it on your Facebook and Twitter accounts!

VPS Hosting Specialist

Juliana is an Online Specialist for high traffic capability VPS Hosting provider based in Los Angeles @InMotionHosting. You can follow her on Twitter for top web traffic tips @JulianaPayson.