Social Networking Benefit I Hadn't Considered

I took part in a www.BlitzTime.com social networking event today. Most of the participants are from the Northeast, so it's fun being one of the few Californians. The point of the event is to share insights and information about social networking. It was worth my while, just for this one very important aspect that I hadn't thought of yet.

• Google crawls social networking sites.

What does this mean? "Crawls" means they send out their little software robot to "read" websites. The more content and the more links going into a site, the more often their robot goes to that site and the more credibility the information on that site has. LinkedIn and FaceBook have a lot of inbound links and a lot of content. "Crawling" is how Google (and other search engines) decide to rank websites when they return the search results. So you want heavy hitters like the social networking sites to point to your name and your business name.

Try searching for yourself in Google. For example, when I search for Beth Bridges, results from FaceBook and LinkedIn are near the top of the list. This blog is in the first page of results - pretty good. I link to this blog from LinkedIn which probably helps my blog's relevancy.

At the BlitzTime event, I met Justin Levy who is the owner of Caminito Argentinean Steakhouse among several other entrepreneurial endeavors. He has over 3,000 inbound links to his site and attributes the majority of these to his social networking activity.

This valuable lesson was worth every minute I spent:

• Get on Social Networking sites and link them to your blog or website to increase ranking, relevancy, and traffic.