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Michael Gray has written a great piece at Search Engine Land on how stories promoted in a social media site have actually translated to higher rankings. He takes a bunch of unpopular domains (e.g. not Forbes, Jalopnik, or other known car sites) and shows how their rankings have improved after the particular stories have been submitted to a site like Digg. Then he looks at the keyword rankings for each of these stories. It becomes obvious that social media is an alternative to link building but that it's imperative to use your keywords that you want for ranking in the Digg submission.
Of course, there are links to be gained, but there's obviously a lot more -- direct sales, awareness, and then some.
So why is it that you haven't tried social media marketing yet?
Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.
Comments:
Michael Martinez
12/19/2008 05:55 pm
One might derive an impression from that article that there is a competitive advantage to leveraging social media links for search optimization. However, the examples he provides don't support that thesis because they appear to be the only content actually optimized for the expressions with on-page factors (in other words, it's NOT just the social media links that are making an impact on search results). It's an interesting analysis but it would have been more helpful if he had addressed the on-page optimization that is inherent in typical blog posts (keywords are often embedded in titles, page URLs, and in on-page text).
diarmuid ryan
12/20/2008 01:37 am
i find social media quite ineffective compared to time that could be spent on more effective seo
Paul Moore
12/22/2008 12:40 am
I intend to start using social media immediately for my new journal blog. I believe web 2.0 and social media is powerful in getting traffic to your site.
Lothar Seifert
12/22/2008 12:24 pm
Excuse me, my English is not so good. I think in many social Networking to be, requires a lot of time. It is only good for me when I find interesting people there.
Adam Lee
12/22/2008 01:09 pm
I've been looking at social media a fair bit recently for this very reason and decided to do a bit of research into whether you can get direct links from Facebook with SEO benefit. I've done some test and it looks promising, i've just put a post about it on my blog - http://www.noporkpies.com/seo/seo-links-from-facebook and will update as soon as i get further results.
Jessica
12/22/2008 04:03 pm
I use social media marketing. You get more visitors this way, but these are not targeted visitors. They come to your web site for a few seconds and leave.
Jeff
12/22/2008 04:53 pm
The value of social media in relationship to SEO is all about the target market. Define your target market and then selectively begin your social media campaign. And for many target markets, there will be no social media that's of value.
No Name
12/24/2008 05:52 pm
I can't seem to find a quick list of strong sites offering quality links. Maybe that would be just too easy.
Eric
12/25/2008 05:21 pm
It's questions like these that make me want to stop reading posts from places like 'Roundtable, simply because of the stupidity of the question, and from those who want "further analysis" of the statements being made. Social Media drives traffic and links you knuckleheads, why are we still asking this?
Barry Schwartz
12/25/2008 05:24 pm
Wow Eric. I hope one out of the 9,000+ articles don't upset you that much to stop reading us. Can you also comment on our <a href="http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/019060.html">five years of blogging</A> post and let us know if we should stop after five years?
No Name
12/26/2008 09:15 pm
I definitely think that socialnet links are useful -- they just have to be viewed in the correct relative terms to more "valuable" links such as those in a general-interest discussion forum like The Black Hole or ItsHappening, where they are more likely to come from someone other than the site/link owner themselves....
No Name
02/10/2009 06:22 pm
It seems strange to me that someone promoting link building has the no-follow attribute set on their blog.
Rob Abdul
02/10/2009 07:13 pm
There is no captcha code, or required sign up on this blog. So I presume the no-follow tag I bet stops spammed entries.