by samEarlier today, Google announced that they would be releasing a “badge” feature with the hugely successful Google News service. What this means is that, as you continue to read news stories, you will receive badges that increase in rank the more you consume news. If you like basketball news, you will earn a basketball badge, and so on. Google isn’t the first to adopt this feature, though. To name a few, Foursquare, Squidoo, and Zune have all successfully been using social badges for a while now.
So how can these help you with SEO? Simply through link building. While creating a successful inbound link strategy can be time-consuming, it serves as a staple of good SEO. Using a variety of tactics can improve your success rate. By introducing a badge feature, users are given an incentive to return to the site, and more site views mean higher rankings. Persuading other sites to utilise and feature your badges will help too. Not only will this increase your incoming links, but it will also indicate to the search engines that you have a good relationship with your customers and partner companies, making it clear to them that your network is continuously growing. Giving the badge images relevant anchor text will greatly boost their SEO as well, though it’s important to choose your words carefully, as the last thing you want is for the anchor text to appear to search engines as spam.
Getting a high rank in Google searches is key to successful Internet marketing. By using varied tactics like this, in addition to standard practice, your online marketing strategy is made far stronger and is a great foundation to work from.