Socializing Your Site to Success:
Using Folksonomy to Build Traffic
In the Age of Web 2.0, social sites have made great strides, establishing themselves as valuable resources for web site owners and potential customers seeking to match up supply and demand. What are these social sites and how can they help you increase site traffic on the cheap? It’s all about linking up.
Social Sites
These are sites that post personal or social information for sharing. Some of the most popular of these sites include Facebook, LinkedIn, youtube.com, del.icio.us and flickr.com. youtube encourages visitors to upload home-grown videos or clips ripped from main stream media. Visit youtube.com and you’ll see everything from stupidity in the extreme to thought-provoking video vignettes produced by film buffs and kids, some cool, some sophomoric.
Another popular site, del.icio.us (pronounced delicious) is a repository for personal bookmarks or tags. When web users find an interesting site or interesting information, they tag it, categorize it and post a link on del.icio.us. What’s particularly interesting about this social site is that categories for links are being developed by users.
These user-created categories are called folksonomy as opposed to the traditional taxonomy of classification used in science, industry and knowledge management. For example, the well-known Dewy Decimal System, used in libraries to assign books to specific categories, is an example of a taxonomy. At del.icio.us users catalog their own findings, leading to some very interesting classifications.
Social sites encourage group (social) participation dmoz.org, Plurk and Wikipedia, for example, and rely on the concept of extreme trust – that idiots won’t subvert the system with frivolous or misleading posts, but even though these sites are routinely monitored, the idiots do occasionally prevail.
What started as an experiment has now become a movement with social sites for all ages, male and female, families, businesses and even entire industries popping up like mushrooms. It’s a new form of social interaction that can help web site owners get a lot of attention for very little $$$.
Inbound Links
Inbound links to your site, that is links pointing visitors to your site, are very useful in getting your little ebiz noticed by search engine spiders. Spiders look for inbound links and count them up based on the reasonable assumption that the more sites and individuals recommending your site via inbound links, the better your site must be. Those sites with long lists of quality inbound links are designated as authority sites – sites that competitors send their visitors to. So, the more inbound links you have from more sites and more individuals, the more impressed SE spiders are.
Getting inbound links used to be a time-consuming, frustrating experience for online business owners. There were email exchanges, telephone calls and something called “links begging” which is as humiliating as the name indicates. Then, software was developed that enabled site owners to contact like-minded individuals and businesses with a spam-plea for a link exchange. These emails usually ended up in the recycling bin unread.
Today, through the use of social sites, acquiring inbound links is more efficient and a whole lot less humiliating.
Social Sites & Inbound Links
Social sites enable you to create a free presence on the web. Actually many free presences on the web. For example, youtube will display a video you made – a video that shows one of your products in practical use, perhaps? Sneaky but legit.
myspace.com is an extremely popular social site where anyone can create an online profile of themselves, their hobbies and interests and the URLs of their web sites. So, anyone looking at your profile has the option of visiting your site. And, if they like what they see, they may book mark it and even recommend it to other myspacers.
Del.icio.us is a repository of recommended (bookmarked by just plain folks) sites. There are lots of bloggers listed, providing a useful means of contacting bloggers who might be interested in running a story on you and your site.
The ultimate objective is to have your site tagged by as many users as possible. This social tagging indicates a level of site quality simply because so many individuals have tagged it for the benefit of other users. Think of it as digital promos from satisfied customers.
Better Keep ‘em Satisfied
To have satisfied visitors willing to tag your site, you need content – interesting, useful, engaging, non-hype content. Blogs are useful in this regard. In fact, when you start a site blog, you’re on track for lots of inbound links. Blogs, according to the pros in the know, are the quickest way to develop inbound links. Blogs are simply another aspect of the socialization of the w3.
No useful content, just a bunch of sales garbage, is not going to get your site tagged. However, useful product reviews, short how-to articles and other “good-to-know” information will get your site tagged – a lot.
So, grow your business by creating an online presence on every social site you can. Create profiles, upload videos and add book marks to your site on del.icio.us and ask friends to do the same. It’s free advertising and a terrific way to get to know your visitors and what they’re looking for.
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