You probably have heard all over the place that one of the keys at succeeding with Web 2.0 is to make everything appear as natural as possible to the search engines. By making your linking strategies appear more natural you rank more highly in the search engines and you are much less likely to have your sites banned, pages deleted, and your sites de-indexed.

There are many aspects of Web 2.0 that allow you to make your linking appear more natural. Many people simply create a pile of pages on social networking sites and bookmark them and have everything linking to the main page. The only thing they worry about is not gaining too many links in one day, but it still doesn’t appear natural! Here I will tell you how to use many aspects of Web 2.0 to make your linking strategies appear more natural to the search engines.

Diversification is key. You need to have links coming from as many different places and as many different types of places as possible. Here are the different methods you can implement to make your linking strategies appear natural.

Social Networking:

Social networking is an important part of your linking strategies. We both know this. However, you need to make sure that your linking appears natural. There are a few ways that you can do that with your social bookmarking.

The first thing you can do is make sure that the sites don’t just link back to yours. Link your pages to each other and to your main site, so it is not obvious that you are simply linking back to your site for backlinks. If every page only linked back to your site, then you would get screwed very quickly by Google, as it would be obvious once you Google notices 300 pages linking to your domain and nothing else. That is very unnatural, and will get you in trouble VERY quickly.

The second thing you can do is don’t always use the same sites. If you are always using the same sites, and always linking to the same sites, then Google will notice. It may take them a month or so, but you will get caught. Use one set of networking sites one time, and a different set of networking sites another time. Then use half of the first set of sites and half of the other set. Mix it up!

Don’t link to the same sites either. If your Squidoo lenses are always linking to your Wetpaint pages, it will get suspicious. Change up the linking structure and link to different places. If you forget about putting a link in, don’t worry about it! Just leave it alone! It will appear more natural.

Also, if you are using software to do a lot of the work for you (like SEnuke) and a site or two fails, then leave it alone! See if you can figure out why the site failed, and then fix it for the next run, but don’t change anything that you already did.

These mistakes make it look natural, which is exactly what we are striving for. (It also saves you time because you don’t have to keep going back and fixing things that went wrong.

Social Bookmarking:

Social bookmarking is probably one of the most discussed parts of Web 2.0. Everyone tells you to bookmark your pages and you will gain huge amounts of traffic.

We are also told to use bookmarking to gain backlinks to our websites. There are many different tools that have been created to help automate the process of bookmarking as many sites as possible in very little time. Some examples of these are Bookmarking Demon, which is the most popular bookmarking tool and is hailed as the best bookmarking software ever, Bookmark Generation, and SEnuke, which I personally use for my bookmarking, along with other functions.

So how do you make bookmarking look natural? First of all, don’t bookmark one page 10 times in one day. I have seen people do this, and it is just stupid. If anyone reading this bookmarks more than once/day, STOP! There are only a few situations when you should even bookmark once/day but most of the time you should bookmark once every two or three days. If you are trying to really make it look natural, then you should only bookmark once a week.

The second thing is to not create a new profile and immediately bookmark your page. Create a profile and then the next day or a couple days later bookmark your pages. The bookmarking sites will notice that your page is being bookmarked immediately after account creation. It just isn’t natural.

The third thing is to make sure that each of your accounts doesn’t have all the same sites bookmarked. It is pretty obvious if 50 bookmarking accounts all bookmarked the exact same pages, and if they were bookmarked in the same order then it is even worse. Don’t bookmark all of your pages with each account. Bookmark some with one account, some with another. This is a huge part of making your bookmarking appear natural.

The last thing, and probably one of the most important things with social bookmarking is to bookmark other people’s pages, and pages that are not all related to the same niche. The bookmarking sites can tell if you are bookmarking all of your own sites and no one else’s, and you may get banned.

So it is very important to bookmark other people’s pages that are related to yours, and other people’s pages that aren’t related at all. What I do is I comment on blogs or guest post on other people’s blogs and then I bookmark those pages. That way all the pages with my links on them have a little more power, sharing a little more juice with me and making my bookmarking appear very natural.