A Crazy Idea: Use Your Bio as an engine to promote your SEO Projects.
Your online identity is changing rapidly and it is playing a more and more important role in the electronic business world. A seemingly obvious fact we are now simply ignoring is that our personal and company biographies are powerful engines to promote SEO. This idea may sound a little crazy, but it does work. So, start to use you bio!
Personally, I feel a little ashamed as I haven’t been so smart or strategic to make the bio sections more useful and attractive to readers or to use it as a powerful engine to promote my SEO projects.
The image below shows some of the potential opportunities you can make use of:
Listed below are some important points you should remember:
● A great bio should have links – it’s not just for SEO; users want to learn, too! If I love a post or a piece of content or let’s say, I am inspired/interested by a line I read about someone, I should have the opportunity to learn more. That’s why those links are necessary.
● Co-citation is also very important here. If I use the words “SEOmoz” and “SEO Software” together, there’s a much better chance that in the future, I’ll get to recognize that the two are related through one way or another, say Google/Bing. Up to now, because of our history, the viewers are much more likely to think that SEOmoz is a consulting company (I almost made “consulting” an image, just to over-emphasize that point).
● How many links you want to put in and where they are linked to is totally up to you. In the example above, I’ve made a lot of links – maybe too many, but because they’re not offensive to the link text or simply there are just there for search engines, my bio doesn’t appear boring or useless(plus, as an SEO guy, the viewers might feel confused if I didn’t try linking in my profile!)
● The length of your bio is often flexible – there are several versions ranging from the very short, one sentence segment to the several paragraphs which provides you some sites/spaces to add more links.
I’m certainly not suggesting that we should all fill our profiles with obviously-SEO-intended links, let alone using so many idealized link text for search engines that it becomes boring and hardly readable. However, a great idea is that we would learn a lot if we review from the perspective of a SEO guy the strategies that evangelists, speakers and contributors of folks across your organization apply. These strategies are among the most reasonable, harmless, natural and powerful forms of link building . But in most cases, these strategies are not fully and properly used.
Recognize the potential opportunities and it’s ok to be as aggressive as you feel as no harm would do to third parties who post your bio (to get the description you want). Pay due attention to branding, co-citation and keywords.
p.s. Linkscape’s web index just updated! New stats are below:
●Pages: 41,806,430,494
●Root Domains: 111,479,320
●Subdomains: 387,061,888
●Links: 423,876,083,081
●% of Links that are Nofollowed: 2.18%
●Average # of Links/Page: 61.69
●% of Pages w/ Rel=Canonical: 7.02%
Check out the new data in OpenSiteExplorer, the Web App, the MozBar and our Labs Tools.
p.p.s. It’s been a while since I did the last headsmacking tip (#16) way back in November of 2009! Hopefully this will spur me to re-visit the series more often.