Best Practices for having Social Profiles indexed

[WilliamBay]

There has been a lot of talk lately around social profiles potentially improving your brand as well as search.

What I'd like to know is the best practices for getting those social profiles crawled and indexed so they actually provide a good link to my site.

I'm also wondering what the difference between what Linkscape sees and what Google sees and when I'm looking at Open Site Explorer's rankings on one of those social profiles how can I be sure that Google sees it the same way.

I ask this because a lot of these profiles are not well internally linked to. An example is about.me, it's a potentially great link, but it's essentially an island, and even after dropping a couple Twitter links to my profile, Open Site Explorer shows and Page Authority of 1, and it's not even indexed with Google.

What I did last night was put a link to my about.me, flickr and wedding wire in my Connect menu drop down on my site to get that crawled hopefully soon.

Are there other methods of getting those crawled and indexed so it starts passing some juice?
What do you guys do?

[IoanSaid]

A quick side-question, I have an about me page:  http://about.me/ioansaid

Looks nice enough and all that and I guess it's quite friendly and less commercial looking of a link than my company link which is what I have in my twitter profile.

Twitter has much higher authority and all that than About.me as you pointed it out so I thought that having my http://celynnenphotography.co.uk link there would be more beneficial than my about.me page. But perhaps the About.me would generate more clicks? I don't know..

Purely for SEO purposes, am I right in leaving my company's link there or perhaps should I put my About me and hope for more clicks?

[WilliamBay]

Agreed for sure. That is actually what I tell my clients.

And I myself follow the same practice. I'm very involved on Facebook, increasingly involved on Twitter, and do a little on Flickr.

But the About.me site is a very interesting one. There is very little method to interact with other members as of now, but do see a great opportunity to being on there. I was just wondering for sites like these if there was a better way to get them indexed.

Thanks for the response.

[MBayes]

Trying to force a search engine into indexing a page is a losing tactic. Having been down the social media profiles path, in my opinion, (and based on our limited research) it's far better to focus your energy on a few high profile social sites (Twitter, face book, linked in)  and do so from the non SEO approach. Give great information, interact,  and meet interesting people and businesses.  The SEO effect will follow.

Having your clients Face book comments shared is far more important than having 250 social profiles.  Let's face it, if you can buy 100's of social media profiles for $5.00  how valuable can that really be?

One of our major challenges with clients is convincing them that the easy road in SEO  may head up for a while, but always seems to end with a long slow and ugly decline. (a mountain road metaphor)

Go for Quality!  Think like there is no Google or Bing and your SEOo will produce better and longer term results.

While I have seen temporary rating boasts with social profiles,  unless the account is used as intended,  and grown, those ratings disappear pretty fast.