If you want your social media profile pages to rank highly in the search results, it’s important to build links for them. There are billions of pages in Google’s index and only those pages with enough linkjuice are going to reach the front page in a competitive query.
Getting quality external links to social media profiles can be difficult, but you can often get good internal links with just a little bit of participation. And those internal links are a very powerful, underrated SEO ranking factor.
Take a look at Tribe.net, an “underground” social networking community that is popular with bellydancers and the Burning Man set. For every discussion group (“tribe”) that you join, it creates an internal link back to your profile. The same thing happens when you add someone as a friend. If you joined a few hundred tribes, you would get a generous flow of internal linkjuice back to your profile and blog, where you can link out to anything (without a nofollow tag).
My friend ZagZag has a several hundred internal links and just one lone external link (according to Yahoo Site Explorer) and she has a toolbar PageRank of 4. A well-connected page like this is strong and much more likely to show up in the search results than an orphan profile page with no friends.
A similar thing happens on the popular microblogging site Twitter. The more people that follow you, the more little icons create internal links back to your profile. New media consultant Marshall Kirkpatrick has over 1500 followers, each with a tiny icon that links back to his page, pimping his profile up to a toolbar PageRank 5.
On social bookmarking sites, one of the more powerful ways to funnel internal linkjuice is through tagging. Take a site like Del.icio.us, where the external links are “nofollowed” but the internal ones are juicy. For each tag you add to your bookmark, your bookmark will then get added to the corresponding “tag” page with a internal link back to your profile page.
If you very generously describe your submissions with tags that correspond to popular, high-ranking tag pages, your profile will get some sweet, del.icio.us linkjuice.
Bonus tip: For reputation management purposes, sometimes you just need a page – almost any page – to show up in the search results. The internal tag pages on popular social sites like Propeller or WordPress.com can rank very strongly. If you wanted to rank for “Blockbuster Video,” then just make several submissions or blog posts with those tags and see where it takes you. If the tag page isn’t strong enough to rank from the internal links, build some externals.
