social networks
Social Networking sites are not all equal. Some lend to one's optimization efforts and some do not. It is
useful to know the value of each before participating. For security purposes, many social networking sites try to isolate their members
from the rest of the internet. While they may not lend themselves to your SEO efforts, they still can have
value in themselves for business networking within the network community itself. It depends on who you gather as "friends."
Arrows↑ ↓ indicate their respective SEO value.
- ↑ LinkedIn
- LinkedIn is the social networking tool for business. Each of your company's employees can create an individual profile and network with others.
- ↑ BusinessWeek Business Exchange
- Businessweek's social bookmarking community, Business Exchange, is helpful for SEO purposes. If you have a LinkedIn profile set up, you can integrate your LinkedIn profile with your Business Exchange profile and add up to three links in your Business Exchange profile. These also include your preferred descriptive text or anchor text.
- ↑ Digg
- A link from your profile at Digg provides some SEO value. After you log in, go to your profile page (www.digg.com/users/username) and click on the "Add a Bio & Links" link in the "About" section.
- ↑ BoomJ
- BoomJ is an acronym for baby boomers and generation jones. Searches in Google and others will bring up BoomJ profiles, blogs and
articles. This is helpful for one's SEO work. BoomJ is owned and operated by a company that specializes in internet advertising and
e-commerce. They employ many techniques to help one's overall web presence.
- ↓ StumbleUpon
- There isn't a place on StumbleUpon's social network to add a link to your Web site, and any links you share with other users have the "nofollow tag" on them. However, the RSS feeds of your submissions and your blog items on StumbleUpon don't have the nofollow tag on them. Adding those RSS feeds to other sites that accept RSS feeds, such as FriendFeed.com, may be helpful for SEO purposes.
- ↓ Facebook
- There isn't anyway to link from your Facebook profile page to your Web site that "counts" as a good link. While you certainly can add a link to your Web site in your Facebook profile, these links include a "nofollow tag," so they won't provide much value if they appear in your public profile (the version that's seen by the search engines).
- ↓ MySpace
- On MySpace, there are no places where your link "counts" for SEO purposes. However, if your MySpace account has traffic and visitors, it still may help drive some traffic to your Web site.
- Social networks fit under Golden Rule Three