Tuesday, August 5, 2008

How To Make Your Website Work For You, Part 8

Social networks are all the rage. The most famous of them is probably My Space and then came You Tube and Facebook and LinkedIn, Moli and many more with more on the way. Many of these sites are being utilized with success by businesses seeking new markets, new viewers. Some are putting their toes in the water and others are jumping in full on.

These sites are ways that you can network with thousands of other people and share common interests. Your business is part of you and it makes sense to include it in your profiles and even a bit of self-promotion. In addition, many businesses are linking their blogs, newsletters and such to these networks so that people will visit all of your various sites. It's like having 10 websites in 1.

It's interesting that this also helps in the search engines, especially when searching names. I know if I search my own name that I come up on the top of the page and the link is to LinkedIn. Nothing wrong with that. Then if you click on that link, you see some information including a company name and links to my website. That'll work! Getting to the top of the list is cool and helpful as well. I know that is what a lot of people focus on--getting to the top of the page. So, here I wasn't even trying and there it is. This is how powerful some of the social networking sites can be for you and your website and other interests. If I type in our company name, it also is at the top of the page, but the link comes from this blog. We talked about blogs in this series and you can see by this some value of the blog in finding you on the web along with the value of the information in the blog.

When I type in part of my business name (Upward Trend) and my name, of the 10 items on the first page, 8 of them match me and the company. Two are links to this blog. Another is Technorati which is a social network for blogs, two are for LinkedIn, and the last three are to our other website, Commercial Truck Success, but through the use of multiple domain names pointed at that site. It's not that I was trying to do all of this, but you can see that it is working at bringing our information at the top of the pages.

It all has to do with information though. For example, if you just typed in Upward Trend, you would have very different results because the phrase Upward Trend is used in many common ways and is generally used in reference to market trends or sales trends and such so there are a lot of links from all over the place. If you just add a bit of definition such as our complete name: Upward Trend Management Services, we come up to the top via this blog, not the website, but the blog is a direct link to the website and much more, so it is all good.

The bottom line is that there are a number of things that you can do to promote your website. Some of these things are becoming familiar with some of the social networks. It is very easy to do. Joining is free. Join them all if you like.

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