SECTION VIII
Sites to Target
Linking Methods

Sites where you build a profile, page, comment in forums or otherwise interact in a way that allows for inclusion of information about your site and (more importantly) links to yourself are sprouting up like weeds all over the web. While many of them are completely useless; others can provide good exposure and even the occasional, valuable link.

Sites to Target:

A comprehensive list of the most prominent social media sites, including descriptions and info on how useful they are from a marketing/linking perspective, can be found below. Each link will take you to the article’s analysis of the site. While the actual linking value of most of these is relatively small, there are some, such as Wikipedia, that can be extremely valuable.

1. Digg
2. Del.icio.us
3. Technorati
4. Squidoo
5. Netscape
6. LinkedIn
7. Newsvine
8. Wikipedia
9. Reddit
10. Ma.gnolia
11. StumbleUpon
12. Shoutwire
13. Facebook
14. 43 Things
15. YourElevatorPitch
16. Flickr
17. WikiHow
18. BlueDot
19. StyleHive
20. JotSpot
21. Wetpaint
22. Shadows
23. Yahoo! 360
24. Furl
25. Ning
26. Frappr
27. The Best Stuff In The World
28. MySpace
29. Yahoo! Answers
30. Rdiculous

When built in concert and with style and substance, profile building can work quite well: You can gain lots of relatively neutral links and perhaps a few strong ones by building social media profiles. Be careful with theses sites as it’s very easy to get spammy with your design and linking. It’s important to remember that you’re building a site representative of your brand. It may not be viewed by many people, but those that do should get a favorable impression of your site.
A portion of the Squidoo profile for one of our clients:

Linking Methods:

Social media sites essentially give you the opportunity to link to yourself from outside of your own site. You should always put links to your site in profiles that you build, whether they are business related profiles for you as an individual or profiles for your business itself.

Submitting content from your site to places like Digg or Reddit gives you links on those sites and, if your article becomes popular, can get you hundreds more links as other sites pick up, link to and discuss content they found on Digg. This is often called viral content because once it catches on it can spread to lots of users very quickly.

If you actively comment at sites, you can often include a link in your comment signature. These are usually not tracked by the search engines (except at Flickr) so they don’t give any direct link-love. However, if other users like what you say, they may follow your link and this could result in organic links. Seek out active blog and community discussions where link-dropping in context is permitted.