There are five critical steps to optimizing your website's position for search engine rankings. They are blogs, video online, social networking, social bookmarking, and content sharing sites.
The previous articles in this series have looked at the first four individual and group strategies to promote your business and to improve your search engine rankings organically. These include blogs, video online, social networking along with social bookmarking.
In this article in this series, we will discuss the last of the five critical steps; content sharing sites. This strategy is often described as the cornerstone of all the strategies that will accelerate the dissemination of the information from all the others to dramatically boost the rankings and presence of your website.
Definition
Content sharing sites are described as those sites that share a wide variety of information, and can include video, audio, text documents, PDFs; in fact anything with digital content.
There are many content sharing sites that do these things to varying degrees. They include, but are not limited to YouTube, Flukiest, Flickr, Scribd.com, and Squidoo.
Content sharing can also take the form of written articles to share with others who are looking to learn from the Internet. Many expert authors and publishers use sites like EzineArticles to dissribute and share their writings with other people who have similar interests.
The content sharing site I'm currently using is Squidoo and it's a site dedicated to making it easier for you to find useful and specialized information (called lenses) and all of the content is written by real people. Not only that but you can search sites and information as well as publish your own articles (lenses) for free.
Content Sharing as a Strategy
Huge numbers (in the hundreds of millions) of visitors and subscribers hit these pages every month. Some sites are more specialized than others depending on the content that individual sites allow to be uploaded.
Some sites predominately have document uploads while others include video, audio and pictures in their various formats. Many of the top group of content sharing sites allow almost every imaginable type of digital upload including PDFs, spreadsheets, JPG, GIF, word documents as well as video and audio.
Often these sites can embed your documents in your blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other social media. To be totally effective in such diverse formats these sites must have large capacity storage areas to allow you to upload as much as you want.
Many sites also allow you to determine the access you wish to give to your guests. This way you can share your content with everyone and be in public access groups. Alternately you can restrict access to only those specific groups or individuals you want to share your most valuable information with. This way you are totally in control.
You can also target specific groups with precise and detailed information. Once you have qualified your groups you can place them in very specific cohorts. Your most frequent and valued buyers can then receive more targeted information compared to that of less qualified customers or prospects.
All of these fantastic features provide the informative benefit of providing target communications to qualified groups while dramatically improving your conversion rates. Not only that but this also enhances your credit and improves your business reputation, which ever increases traffic, conversion rates and your sales can dramatically increase by 10 fold or even more.
Finally, content sharing sites are fantastic for organic search engine rankings and can improve your placement even up to near the top of first page.
The two-way communication with these sites helps you to build a strong relationship with your valued clients and places you much higher on the search engine rankings. And the really great news is that these places you in an excellent position of being higher on your client's shopping list when they are in need of your products or services.
Many of these sites also allow you to link directly into the other social media in your portfolio of strategies. These can include your external social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
In summary
Content sharing sites are considered to be the cornerstone of your Internet marketing plans and strategies and as such fit in with all of your other strategies including your blog, video online, social media and social bookmarking sites. Content sharing can take virtually any form of digital information including video, audio, text, spreadsheets, pictures and PDFs. They can also be as simple and easy as free article publishing and sharing sites.
One thing they all have in common is that they all go to enhance your search engine rankings of your website. When they all link up with your other sites including your external social media sites they greatly accelerate the distribution of your content. Not only that but they greatly improve your professional credibility and the reputation or your business. All of this goes to increase your conversion rate and boost your sales figures by many times.
In the final article in this series we will discuss the concluding strategy of bringing the whole process together in one cohesive package.
Enjoy.