I’m sitting here, waiting for my six year old get done with her ballet class in downtown Columbus. Sure, I’ll give Ballet Met a plug – it’s probably the best ballet place in town – and my kid loves it – and it gives me an opportunity to peck away on my laptop and write this article about Web 2.0 properties.
I’ve been doing SEO work for many clients over the past year and currently am doing backlinking work for Digital Memories Online. They say it’s a long way to the top if you want to Rock and Roll – and I believe it. Recently though, for me getting my client’s websites to the top, I am doing things differently. It’s a lot more work to do but in the end – it will pay off.
Web 2.0 properties seems like the latest craze but it’s been around for a while. Squidoo, the site with “lenses”, was king of the properties but I believe Google is allowing HubPages to take the throne. This throne that HubPages posesses is quite a powerful throne and here is why.
I’ve been writing articles and throwing them on the alter of HubPages (mind you, nobody has to approve them). I had the links going from the article to my client’s landing page of his website. The same day I published it, the page was indexed by Google. I didn’t use any signature links from a forum to try to get it indexed – it just seemed like the GoogleBot was sitting there, waiting for me to finish the article so it could gobble up the data and throw it in the SERPs. And by the way, the Google gods gave me a #9 ranking right off the bat! Wow and double wow! This website rocks! But I’m not putting all my eggs in one basket. I’ll have to visit the former king of Web 2.0 properties – Squidoo. It still does well, and I believe that it still is an authority site, but not what it used to be. So for every page I write for Hubpages, I will spin it and create a lens and place it on Squidoo.
Now let’s stop there for a second. When I say spin the article, I’m not talking about taking an original copy of the article and replacing a word here and there. If I did that, Google would penalize the copy (and no, it wouldn’t penalize the site that it is linking to as some people would think).
When I spin an article, I summarize it. The same thought of the article would still be there and yes, it would look similar, but each sentence is summarized differently and words are either add or taken away from each paragraph. So I do a true spin of the original article – I really don’t want any bot to penalize my hard work.
Getting back on track here, I am placing an article on each Web 2.0 property. I use about ten of them, So if you can imagine ten web 2.0 property sites linking to one landing page (and each property site has a high PR), this will boost the landing page within the SERPs. Wait! I’m not done yet. In order to put the icing on the cake, I have to do one more thing. For each property, I have 20 – 25 Social Book Marking Sites pointing not at it. For an example, let’s take my new favorite Web 2.0 property – HubPages. I have SBM sites such as Digg, SU, BackFlip, LinkaGoGo, WebMarks, Reddit, Mixx, Spurl, etc. bookmarking my hub or article I just wrote in HubPages. This does two things. It will index the article more quickly and give more bots a path to the hub that I wrote and then it sees my link to my client’s landing page.
OK – let’s rewind this. Let’s say I’m a bot, I’m traveling from link to link. I come upon a Social BookMarking site that has a page with a link recently bookmarked. The link leads to an article that was written by a person on Hubpages. It is now on the Hub gobbling up data and then it runs into another link that takes it straight to a landing page. Do ya get it now?
I DO NOT link the Web 2.0 properties to each other to form a link wheel. If I do – Google will bust me on that. Link Wheels have been done by SEO specialist to make their linking more powerful but they are trying to cheat the system. Google will see these links not being natural at all.
Click on this page to see how I usually backlink to client’s websites.