Using the Delicious Social Network to Build Inbound Links – It’s a legitimate link building strategy that works well, sometimes.
If you’ve ever taken on the challenge of running your own SEO campaign you’ve no doubt discovered that link building, the part that you probably thought would be the easiest, turned out to be the most time consuming part of all. Locating links is no easy task – even for experienced experts, that’s why they charge so much for the service.
Using social networks to build inbound links can often be extremely effective, sometimes slightly effective, and sometimes not at all effective. Link building success through social networks depends on a variety of factors. The theme and content of your Website is obviously one very important factor. Websites with great content accumulate links with so much less effort that the link building is totally passive, meaning that they happen naturally through the growth of the Website. But in many situations it’s difficult to produce content that will attract so much attention that inbound links will occur naturally, and that is why we use tools like social networks to help us build links.
Getting Started With Delicious.
Today social networks are all the rave and there are more than a handful of social networks sites available to promote your Website. But of all the social networks, I choose Delicious as the easiest to get started with because it’s easy to understand, there are no downloads to get started, and the spam control is enough that the network is actually capable of generating Website traffic.
Most social networks operate on the same basic principals similar to a search engines. The more popular a Web page the higher it ranks in the social network rankings. So for you to capitalize on Delicious, the object, can challenge, for you is to get Delicious users to save your Web page as a favorite. When this happens according to plan, your Web page ranks higher in the Delicious rankings and bloggers, community Website users, social network users and Webmasters will find your Web page, hopefully like it , and link to it. And there you go! It’s called social network optimization, and it’s link building for free.
This sounds so easy.
It does sound easy but it does take work. Let’s go back to the topic of Website. If the content isn’t interesting nobody will link to it no matter how many social networks you save the Web page to, so your focus should begin with and remain on creating interesting content. And once you have that content you still need to have friends on the Delicious network who you can recommend links to. And it does take work to build up your network, but once you’ve achieved that network it doesn’t take much to increase the rank of a Web page in a moderately competitive category, and at this point you should have a good idea of how to approach a highly competitive category. Say like the “camping” category.
Experiment with it.
Let’s look at a simple experiment I did with my canoe camping Website. I wanted to get a particular Web page ranked in Delicious for the keyword category “canoeing”. At the time there were 2131 results for that term and my Web page was ranking somewhere on the fourth page of Delicious. One Delicious user had already saved the Web page to his favorites in May 2007, and another in August 2007. And in February 2008 I enlisted three friends to create Delicious accounts and save my Web page to their favorites tagged with the keyword “canoeing”. And within days my Web page was ranking at the top of the Delicious results. I then achieved high ranking results with other Web pages with similar keywords. Although these Web pages don’t get a ton of traffic referrals from Delicious, partly because the theme is seasonal and the keywords aren’t extremely competitive, traffic referrals from Delicious do trickle in and will increase as the canoeing season arrives. And although it’s impossible to say how many links might result from this experiment it is safe to say that if bloggers and Webmasters find my Web page on Delicious there is a definite possibility. And the more competitive the category the greater the chance of obtaining links.
Another Delicious rankings I achieved was with the Remington Model 870 Shotgun Sweepstakes. There are over 4000 Delicious results for the term “sweepstakes”. I got the Remington Sweepstakes Web page ranked in the top 50 results with only six users in my network saving the Web page.
What we learned.
So we learned that Delicious optimization is easy to achieve in a noncompetitive category, but the benefit might be negligible. To achieve greater benefit you need to achieve rankings in the competitive categories as well. So while I was trying to get ranked for the keyword category “sweepstakes”, I should also try to rank for the keyword category ”contest” which has over 56,000 results. And along with the “canoeing” category I should try to rank for the ”camping” category which has over 43,000 results. As with SEO, if the approach is long-term, the process can be less stressful and the result can be dramatic. And one thing I really didn’t mention but is still very important. Be sure to write clear titles that contain your category keywords because the title and tag keywords of the saved Web page are extremely relevant to the ranking results.
I personally think Delicious is the simplest and most straight forward social network to get started with, and once you get the hang of it move onto others like Stumble Upon and Digg.
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