SEO Step by Step - Promoting Your Site For Free Using Social Networking Sites

This tutorial is just an introduction about how you can quickly promote your site yourself using social networking sites to instantly generate visitors to your site and how to turn this content eventually into good positions in Google, Yahoo and MSN. In some cases it's all the seo you'll ever need (if your site is up to scratch).

Writing search engine friendly content is creative but not black magic. Let's assume you have a site that at least Google can spider, and your using Wordpress (which you can get free) for your blog. If Google can spider it, MSN and Yahoo can too. The aim of this search engine promotion thread is to how you how you can use social marketing and book marking sites to spread the word about your site or product, but more specifically to:

1. Add Useful Content To Your Site
2. Get traffic to your site instantly
3. Get Into Google, Yahoo and MSN Free if you are not there already (and probably within a week)
4. Acquire One Way Non-Reciprocal Links (through social bookmarking)
5. Get Google Pagerank (via links from other sites to this page)
6. Do it all ethically without spamming
7. Do it in (about) one hour - yourself!
8. Eventually appear in Google SERPS

This advice is suitable for any business but it all rests on you finding relevant sites to your niche.

1. The title of your article should contain the keywords or keyword phrase you are targetting.

2. Focus your mind on the content of your page and your target keywords.

3. Write normally as best you can - 500-1000 words. Your view on anything makes it "unique".

4. Check your chosen key-phrase appear in the content once or twice.

5. Bold keyword keyword phrase once or twice in the content to help "emphasize" keywords

6. Make sure you use superlatives and geographic references etc throughout the copy if you offer what you would erstwhile claim. Let Google make the determination you're the expert or the best and that you are based near anywhere. Having the word "best", "flower" and "shop" ANYWHERE on the page could see you rank for "best flower shop" if you have enough links to your site to back this up in Google's eyes. This is a perfect way of saying something when you can't actually say it on page but you know people are using that term in searches. It's about being creative about what you're not saying! Of course adding in a link or two to relevant other websites also helps. Remember if it's not on the page or in links to the page from other sites you wont rank for it in Google. Note also that you could have nine words in a 10 word Google search query and you won't appear anywhere in some cases! This is why when writing your article write naturally and be extensive about your product or service.

7. Publish your article blog. Make sure "pings" is on.

8. If relevant, submit your article to social bookmarking and ranking sites (here's my "technology" favourites - Digg, Delicious, Magnolia, Stumble, Furl and D-zone. Hey presto, you have 6 new links to internal pages already, and may have just cased a traffic spike to your site and in your logs!

Minutes Later....

Check Google Blog Search - are you there?

You might be everywhere! That means there's a chance you've written an exceptional article and now it is available worldwide for people looking for it's content, and all spread automatically to blog sites everywhere thanks to your "pings" from your blog.

A few hours later....

Check Digg, Dzone (obviously these sites are relevant to my industry - you need to find ones relevant to yours etc.). If you've written something of any use to people, people will choose to reward the article by voting for it, meaning it gets seen more, visited more and potentially linked to from these viewers' sites.

Note - You should always be looking to join new sites. I joined Netscape and submitted my first story. It bombed traffic wise but interestingly enough it still did generate a lot of links back to the page.

1 Week Later

Check the social bookmarking sites. If you've written an article of any merit, people will add a link to it (you can see this beside the social bookmark link) - another way of quickly generating 10, 20 or 10,000 links and visits, depending on your article.

Check the search engines. Has the article been spidered yet? (it has probably been picked up from one of your social bookmark links at least if not spidered via your navigation structure (which you should get fixed if is the case). If it has it will be in Google and you never know, it may feature in Google for your chosen search term where you may have not before!

You can check how many sites are linking to your article using Yahoo Site Explorer....(just type "link:www.mysite.co.uk" into Yahoo search box and you will see what I mean. Hopefully this grows over time.

3-4 Months

Check your Google Page Rank - the page has probably got some!

You've successfully written an article and published it to the world in a search engine friendly way that could see you feature in the search engine results for your chosen keywords within days. In some cases, that's all the seo you'll ever need!

The golden rule is to remember that if you want to appear in Google for chosen terms, those terms need to be on your page - but not necessarily all together in your target key phrase. If you want to rank high in Google, you need lots of links linking back to your article.

PS - Social marketing / participation can be addictive! Don't install the StumbleUpon button, for instance, unless you have a few hours to kill!