All links, like all men, are not created equal. Google is continuously updating its algorithms and some things that used to work well are now consigned to the virtual dustbin. That, however, is not the case with Web 2.0 – just the opposite in fact – it really is the hottest ticket around just now.
Web 2.0 is hard to explain because it encompasses an idea rather than a physical entity, but essentially it refers to the current trend for graphically light-weight, simple to use web-sites that specialise in lots of small bits of content rather than encyclopaedic volumes of information.
Popular Web 2.0 sites are Digg, Delicious, Weebly, Squidoo and even sites like YouTube. The great thing about all of these sites is that they are getting massive amounts of traffic and lots of love from the search engines. So how do you, the small website owner leverage this power to your advantage.
Well, it’s really very simple. The Web 2.0 sites can broadly speaking be split up into 3 separate camps. On the left we have the social bookmarking sites. These sites enable you to set up accounts and store your favourite sites from around the internet in one handy location. Of course, if you are link building then you just add details of your own site and voila! – Instant back links. With many of the big social bookmarking sites having PR6 or above, you can see how easy it is to generate piles of high ranking and relevant back links in a short period of time.
Next up, we have the social media sites. These sites, such as YouTube and Twitter have experienced massive growth over the past few years and all of the search engines absolutely love them. You don’t need to spend hours creating video content to benefit from them either, just create an account, add your profile and start commenting on other peoples videos. This can be a very effective method of link building. While Twitter won’t generate a huge number of back links, other than those from your profile, it is a great way to get loads of instant and targeted traffic to your website which will, ultimately boost your search engine rankings.
Finally, we have the Web 2.0 blogosphere. This encompasses sites like Squidoo, Blogspot and many others. These sites allow you to create your own mini-sites with out-bound links, videos, pictures and even advertisements. Each site sits on its own (hopefully keyword rich) sub-domain and is essentially treated like a web site all on its own. The benefit of these Web 2.0 sites is that, for link building purposes, they carry high PR and authority which is passed on to your links. Many internet marketers even use automated software to create post and then interlink these sites with excellent results.
If you don’t currently use Web 2.0 sites as part of your link building strategy then you really ought to. It’s an easy way to get a huge number of high quality, high PR back links for only a little effort.