Getting SEOcial - A Few Days with Web 2.0

This past week has been a huge investment in time for me, joining and learning everything I could about various Web 2.0 communities. I have several clients that will really benefit from participation in these communities, and I can’t coach very well if I’ve never played the game, can i?

I first joined Technorati in 2005, and after a Pubcon conference in 2006, I got Digg and del.icio.us accounts. Since then, I’ve submitted a few articles here and there at Digg and de.licio.us, but beyond that, I’ve admittedly been a pretty slow adopter to the world of social networking.

There are social bookmarking sites that are great for building inbound links, and there are news and article sites that help generate traffic, and they all have communities that are growing all the time.

For me to ignore these Web 2.0 in my effort to drive traffic and links for clients would practically be malpractice, and I think I have a pretty good handle on things now. It’s been quite an educational few days, let me tell ya!

Even though all the pundits have been saying that Web 2.0 is the way of the future, and social media is where everything is happening now, I’ve had other priorities, and I’ve assumed that it was just not that important compared to search engine traffic.

A couple of months ago I joined Facebook, after a friend of mine put his wedding pictures up there, and ended up poking around in their for a while, finding it to be pretty good.

I’ve been using Mybloglog quite a bit, and making sure to comment here and there on people’s profiles that stop by my own blog.

At Danny Sullivan’s Advanced SMX in Seattle last month, I talked to one person after another that was singing the praises of various social networks, social bookmarking, this widget, that widget, and whatever might be coming next.

I even talked to someone who had literally dozens of different logins for many of these services, and paid employees to generate “buzz” for certain clients in certain industries. While that may go against the spirit of these services, there is no denying that the increased traffic leads to increased sales, and ultimately increase profit for the customer.

Last week, the board of SEMpdx was discussing ways to promote an upcoming networking event at Paddys bar downtown. After joining the Portland group of the Facebook, Todd Mintz noticed that there were over 33,000 members in the Portland Facebook group.

That number to me is staggering! I would’ve thought there may be only a few hundred, or even a thousand, but 33,000 members in Portland? Clearly, there’s a ship sailing away here, and I’m not on it!

After that, I spent about an hour joining every one of these social bookmarking groups:

Backflip, Bibsonomy, Blinklist, Blue Dot, de.lirio.us, Diigo, Furl, Jots, Linkroll , Looklater,
Ma.gnolia, Markaboo, Rawsugar, Shadows, Simpy, Spurl , and Wink

Then I made sure that I was a member at most of the other important sites, (some of which I had actually joined quite a while ago but forgot about altogether)

The complete list that I’ve joined is:

Netscape , Newsvine , Plime , Reddit , Stumble Upon , Shoutwire , Tailrank, Squidoo and
PlugIMM .

It sounds like a lot of time, but joining the services took me a total of maybe 90 minutes altogether. What took a lot of time, and continues to, is the endless poking around, and reading of others’ material.

I’m trying to do this with a totally “white hat” mentality, and you really have to, because these sites police themselves, and if they find that you are engaging in shameless self-promotion, and do not participate in their community, and vote on the sites of others, they will bounce you out of the system.

So I’m spending the first week or two getting acclimated to each of the services, and figuring out what they will allow, and what they won’t, and I’ll be reporting back soon.

Until then, happy tagging…

PS-

As usual, being ever so considerate, I’ve made it very easy for you to try out many of these services for yourself.

All you have to do is click on the “Bookmark” button below, (or on the right side of my blog), and you will instantly be transported to whichever service you would like to try.

In fact, I think you should bookmark me at all of them, just to see which ones you like the best.