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).

i find social media quite ineffective compared to time that could be spent on more effective seo

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I can't seem to find a quick list of strong sites offering quality links. Maybe that would be just too easy.

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?

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 five years of blogging post and let us know if we should stop after five years?

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....

It seems strange to me that someone promoting link building has the no-follow attribute set on their blog.

There is no captcha code, or required sign up on this blog. So I presume the no-follow tag I bet stops spammed entries.