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Social media can be a very helpful when trying to increase a website’s overall online presence and its position in search rankings. Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn all enable and encourage the building of connections and friends, and are great for sharing content and communicating in different ways.
Reddit is different. It’s ‘the front page’ of the internet and has a strong community of users all over the world that share content with each other. This means a good, popular post on Reddit can amount to a lot of website traffic derived from relatively little work, but it’s not quite as simple as just posting some good content.
How Reddit Works
Basically it’s a place where users post content, which could be about anything from iPhones and Apple to DIY or SEO. It gets posted in its relevant sub-reddit to categorise it, and then gets up voted or down voted from other users if they like it or not. Now that sounds simple enough but Reddit users can be anyone, and they certainly have a particular liking to certain content. To get good up-votes the content must be fairly funny or geeky or involve cats in some way and is relevant to the sub-reddit where it’s posted. These are just a few example’s, it’s not the only content that gets up-voted. However, Redditors do seem to like cats…a lot!!
To post on Reddit your item has to be in a relevant sub-reddit, so the content has to be something that community will up-vote. Just bear in mind a small sub-reddit like SEO has over 6000 subscribed readers so good content posted that everyone will enjoy could get that many views/up-votes and potentially more. However, posting anything even closely spammy or something that makes it sound like you’re trying to sell through Reddit, you will get down voted and it won’t have even been worth the time.
So how do you use Reddit with a positive effect on SEO?
Post interesting content in any way that could spark someone’s interest. Users may well read more, look at your blog, your business and your services. This is not an easy task especially when it can’t be obvious you’re trying to drive traffic to them. A post that reaches the first page, which leads to a website has sometimes crashed the site through the sheer amount of traffic that can come from it. This amount of traffic doesn’t directly affect the SEO of a website but it will increase its overall online presence a great deal with traffic steadily increasing thereafter.
So is Reddit useful for SEO?
Well, at the moment if you’re an avid Redditor and SEO expert you may be able to come up with a post to drive a great amount of traffic to a website but that’s about all that can come from Reddit. However it doesn’t mean it’s not useful for information regarding SEO. There are always plenty of posts around in the sub-reddit SEO, and link building, which will have helpful information and as Reddit can be the first place for a lot of content, this ends up being shared around on Facebook and other social media. It could be the first place to hear SEO news and have great discussion on the changes as and when Google brings out its next update.
Josh Seymour
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