Professional Social Promotion

Since the latest algorithm updates on Google, (Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird), social media has become a lot more important as a ranking factor for websites.

Many back links that used to work no longer work, and may even work in reverse. For example, here is a list of back link methods that are no longer effective, depending on the authority and relevance of the sites you get the links from:

• article directories (low quality auto approve sites that publish syndicated or duplicate content)
• directory sites (low quality directories that only exist as a place to make back links from)
• social bookmarking sites (only a small handful of these are still beneficial)
• blog comments (relevant comments on high quality moderated blogs may work)
• forum signatures
• RSS feed submissions
• profile links
• .edu and .gov links (depends on how you get them)
• links from resource pages or blogrolls
• paid blog networks like Buy Blog Reviews or Build My Rank

What This All Means For The Future Of SEO

What Google seems to be trying to tell website owners and SEO companies with each update they make to their algorithms is that they don’t like people who build back links just for the sake of SEO.

They don’t like having to sort through billions of pages of rubbish to try to find the real sites, although given that the internet has been built that way for over ten years, they can’t completely change the way that back links determine rankings, or the low quality pages that were made just for back links would rise to the top of the search.

So, the future of SEO is definitely not in the quantity of back links, but in the quality, and those quality links are going to be all that really matters.

The idea is that they’re trying to find the sites that people have linked to naturally, of their own accord, because they thought it was something legitimately worth linking to.

What links are other people most likely to make when they want to share or link to your site? Social media shares and blog posts, and those are the main back links that really work these days.

Guest posts or natural links to your site from other people’s sites, and social media shares and engagement, plus high quality on-page SEO. That’s the future of SEO.

The latest tweaks to the Google algorithms have been about trying to work out the meanings of people’s search queries, and trying to answer a question with the right answer, not just to find a page with the same words on it.

It’s important to update your site regularly with high quality content, lots of words, lots of photos, a good bounce rate, lots of social media shares and a natural looking link profile that doesn’t look like it was made by yourself, or an SEO company.

The Other Side Of Social Media SEO

Links from social media sites like Facebook are no follow, (Google Plus is an exception), which means they don’t pass on any page rank, and even though it’s better than ever before to get social media shares, it’s also easier than ever before to try to rank your social media pages on Google, rather than the other way around.

What that means is that it’s actually easier to rank a You Tube video, a Facebook page or a Google Plus page, especially a local Google Plus business page than it is to rank a website.

If you make a Facebook page and a website on a new domain at the same time and build the same amount of back links to each, there is no question that the Facebook page will outrank the website, so long as you do a few things to show that the page is popular.

For example, you need a lot of likes, which you can get through a targeted Facebook Ads campaign, and you need lots of tabs and photos, and to post regularly on the page.

It’s good if you can get people commenting, liking and sharing your posts, it all gets counted by Google. If you do a search on any large celebrity, public figure or company, you will almost always get their Facebook page on the first page of that search.

Google has realized that people want to see the social media pages of whoever they’re interested in, because that’s how they can get in contact with and see the updates of anyone in the world.

This makes it surprisingly easy in this harsh and confusing SEO climate to rank for almost any phrase you want. It doesn’t just work for celebrity names and companies, if you can convince Google your page is important and popular, it works for almost any phrase.

That’s why I recommend all my clients do keyword research and find a phrase with thousands of exact match searches a month for the title of their page. Most of them don’t have large search volumes for their company or site name, so that’s the wrong title to give your Facebook page in that case.

You can make more than one page, in fact it’s probably a good idea if you do make more than one, because then you can link them together, which is also important, getting internal links within Facebook.

The way to do this is by liking one page with the other, while using Facebook as the page. This creates a permanent link from one page to the other on the front page.

Creating Custom Tabs

It’s a good idea to make your Facebook page as complicated as possible, or to have as many different tabs on it as possible, with lots of quality content, in fact you can put your entire site on your Facebook page, and sell directly from a custom tab, or many.

The best app to use for this is Static HTML: iFrame Tabs, which allows you to put anything you want on a tab in HTML form, and the different options let you easily add You Tube videos, subscription forms, Pay Pal buttons, photos, or literally anything you want.

You can write blog posts, put affiliate links in, even have your actual website in the iFrame so people can visit your site without leaving Facebook.

You can use this app for up to ten different tabs, and if you need anything else, there apps like Contact Form for a simple contact form, Twitter, You Tube, and I was using this great app called Just Redirect, but it seems not to be working at the moment.

As for building back links, I find that a good place to start is with articles on HubPages, Yahoo Contributor Network, Squidoo, and possibly Ezine, then I do social media shares on all the large sites, and social bookmarking on only the large social bookmarking sites like Digg, Linked In, Stumble Upon, Delicious, and maybe Pinterest and Friend Feed.

Then it’s a good idea to find guest posting opportunities on quality, relevant, authority sites with a high page rank and domain authority.

By combining a targeted Facebook Ads campaign to get real fans and customers with SEO, on a page on a site that has huge authority already, you find that doing one thing helps the other, like the fans help the SEO, and ranking on Google gets you free fans.

Over time, your fan base builds, like an email list, and if you do the SEO and keyword research right, you will rank for the phrase with less effort than ranking a site.

All in all, this means that it’s one of the most cost effective ways to run an online marketing campaign, and for a simple idea like selling a single product, you probably don’t even need to have a website at all.

Or if you do, it’s probably best to focus the SEO on the Facebook page, and use the website as a place to make a good quality back link from and not to.

Get In Contact To Talk About These Services

For more information on the subjects talked about in this post, or if you want to get anything done on social media generally, get in contact with me via the contact form.

I offer a range of different internet marketing services, basically I can do anything you want if the price is right.