Socialize your SEO

One of the most crucial aspects of SEO marketing is ensuring your website is socially active. No, your website doesn’t have to wine and dine the big wigs, hangout in clubs and pubs or even go out shopping and talk to people in the queue. What we mean by website socializing is building your online presence through the use of social networking websites in order to promote your own website. You can effectively “borrow” traffic from other websites by being active and helpful on them. Think about it as “you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours”.

The most popular method to do this and often the first stepping stone to ensuring high SEO content and extra traffic is building your own blog. This is particularly useful if your website is minimalistic and SEO content does not really have a place on your main website. You therefore need to get people to your website somehow through SEO content elsewhere. Making a blog that is linked to your website will ensure you get even more SEO content online and you can divert the traffic to your blog directly to your main website. Your blog needs to be relevant in order to ensure traffic flows freely through it to make sure it is about the same topics as your main website. Next you need to build up your blog and get some people interested in it. There are a number of ways in which you can do this. Firstly you need to get your blog listed on as many blog directories as possible. Doing this will ensure other people looking to socialize so to speak will comment on your blog, become followers and so forth. It will also help you with Google rankings and general traffic generation.
Secondly, make sure you have enough content that is well written, useful, informative, interesting and search engine optimized. This ensures that the people who find your blog will stay on your blog and possibly move on to your main website because your content is interesting enough to read.

Make sure you are just as social to other people as they are to you. Comment on other people’s blogs, add friends and generally just build up your network as much as possible. You can use the following blog communities to help you with this:

Mybloglog
Bumpzee
Blogcatalog
BlogRush
ScratchBack

You should also try to get involved with various forum communities and place a link to your blog and/or website in your profile and signature. Talk to people on the forums and get to know them, provide useful information on the topics relevant to your website and people will naturally fell over to your website in return. It also means you get an extra back link online for Google to see.

It’s not just about search engines; there are also a number of alternative services such as social bookmarking services. Submit your blog to these social bookmarking websites to ensure your blog gets seen:

Digg.com
Technorati.com
Stumbleupon.com
Mixx.com
Del.icio.us
Propeller.com
Plugim.com
SEOyak.com
Sphinn.com
Reddit.com
76newsalways.com
scoop.isedb.com
marktd.com
onlineadvertizingnews.net
Gooruze.com

Not all of these will be suitable for your website as some of these are specifically for the SEO topic. You can also build up a list of community websites and again, build up your friends, socializing and write on people’s walls.

Facebook.com
MySpace.com
Orkut.com
Friendster.com
Hi5.com
Tagged.com
Netlog.com
Linkedin.com
Xing.com
Bebo.com
Mashable.com
Hyves.nl
Yahoo 360
Windows Spaces Live
Twitter.com

These are just a few of the websites you need to look at to promote your website in the social world but it should give you a great head start.