Link Blog

What is social networking? Well the answer is fairly simple. Social networking is link development through a community of like minded peoples that is based more on tags and bookmarks. With the inception del.ic.ous, (my new favorite) stumbleupon, digg and technorati the search engines have found that this human reviewed data is invaluable to determine relevance.

By looking at what people are bookmarking and tagging, search engine spiders can identify patterns of people that hold similar interests. By using individuals, instead of directory editors, to determine relevance spam is becoming a less effective measure of attaining top search engine placements. Don't get me wrong, this system is far from perfected but it is coming along in the right direction.

Think about your bookmarks, do you ever bookmark spammy pages with no information? Of course not, why would you? When you bookmark pages you are doing that because they offered something of value to you. It might be information or resources, maybe it is a story you are following, whatever reasons you had to bookmark a page, I bet it wasn't because you wanted to go back and to click on an Adsense ad.

Again, this method of determining relevance is a way for technology to capitalize on what people really think. By reviewing their search patterns and bookmarks from real individuals looking for real information with no incentive to add a link because of a promise of reciprocal link is a really smart way of getting unbiased opinions.

So what does this mean in terms of link development? Well, it means you need to be providing a real service, resource or helpful information to your target audience. Write quality, unique informative information that can really assistance the people that come to your site. Add interactive tools for stickiness, you need to find something that appeals to those in your niche and flaunt it. Basically, you need to get involved in your community.

Until next time - happy linking,
Link Queen