Linkbuilding Through Social Media, Part 1

Social media offers a wealth of new opportunities for networking and creating relationships within the accounting industry, in addition to lending weight to your firm’s SEO.

It’s also a great vehicle for a disciplined linkbuilding contact search. Strategic linkbuilding is definitely an easier task with the plethora of social media sites available today, both industry-specific and public. When you’ve decided your firm could benefit from a boost to your SEO and linkbuilding is on the agenda, there are plenty of opportunities to make it happen. Jordan Kasteler discusses the best places and methods to go about it in a recent article on searchengineland. He covers this important topic thoroughly, so we’re going to divide our discussion into two parts. Today’s portion examines the first steps: identifying and approaching your targets to get the best results.

Identification: You’ll want to focus on three groups to begin your linkbuilding efforts:

• Leaders in the accounting world are an obvious first choice. Not only do they have valuable ideas to discuss but their presence as links increases your SEO as well.
• Audience platforms are another no-brainer for accessing groups that share an interest in your industry niche. These include popular blogs and discussion areas for accounting topics.
• Relevant curators. This group is made up of websites that curate and share financial articles from around the web. You can tailor the search to focus on those that are your favorites to read.
• Don’t forget yourself. Remember to identify yourself in terms of your accounting persona rather than your personal life. For this kind of linkbuilding, your firm’s social life matters, not your own.

When you’ve found your linkbuilding targets (we’ll examine ways to search for good potential links within specific social media sites in part 2) you’re almost ready to approach them with your request for linkage. Keep in mind that it takes some time to establish the networks and the trust that inspire willingness, so keep at it and know that while it won’t happen overnight, if you provide good content and consistent communications it will happen. It goes without saying, or should, that you need to use your best content when linkbuilding. Choose carefully to select only original content with real information value. Don’t try to link with your homepage or other relatively generic pages. You should be offering something fresh and interesting. Once you’ve got the perfect content ready, go for it. Keep in mind the four basic tenets of linkbuilding:

• State your reasons. Let your contacts know specifically why you want them.
• Show your search. Share how you found them as a way to emphasize your information niche.
• Be brief. One of the best ways to show respect is to get to the point. Be polite but succinct.
• Be personal. Use a name! If you can’t be bothered to identify them by name, why should they bother to link to you?

“Simple!” you say, and it really is. It takes research and time, but it’s not rocket surgery. You too can establish your thought leadership and build links to increase online presence and SEO with social media.