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Utilizing Social Signals For Search Engine Optimization Purposes, Don't Get Burned By The Search Engine Optimization Gurus

By Jens Holvoet


In this blog post I clarify why you should not put too much time and work in applying social signals for seo purposes. The Google Penguin update of April 2012 provided search engine optimization gurus once again the opportunity to begin endless debates regarding the future of seo. We are now June three and I honestly find it pretty amusing how the internet marketing industry is dealing with this new update.

The Penguin Update And Social Signals

Every time Matt Cutts announces a brand new update like the Google Panda updates and the most recent Penguin update an enormous tsunami of opinions emerge on this stunning place called the internet. On the other hand, as we all know opinions on the internet occasionally turn into facts and we really need to make sure that we don't jump into conclusions depending on what some people say.

After every single new algorithm change seo gurus quickly begin to develop products that may help you to beat your competition, in this situation they wish to assist you to to kick the Penguin's ass. They tell you that they've spent a good deal of their precious time on researching how the update has affected their internet sites and what you can do to "recover" from it (in case your web pages took a hit). They gathered a bunch of information of which you clearly cannot verify if it is real information or not and form a conclusion concerning the recent update. So how to recover from the update? Well, their conclusion is simple: just buy their new wonderful product that will bring your website back to the top of the serps (search engine results pages). But how the hell do you know that these tools and information and facts are actually valuable?

About The Search Engine Optimization Social Signals Hype

There's currently a huge buzz regarding social signals going on. Just after the Penguin update various search engine optimization gurus claimed that the amount of backlinks generated by social media websites would turn out to be so vital for seo which you must mainly focus on your social signals now. Naturally these are the same people who are now promoting tools which will allow you to create a lot more and better targeted Facebook likes, re-Tweets, Google+ shares... some of them even claim that old backlinking tactics died since the recent update. Hahahaha. Okay, I had my laugh, let's be serious now: the world wide web was built through backlinking. There is no way that social media shares are going to be more crucial for seo than all the other seo tactics. Social media web sites are a product of the web and these web-sites can disappear just as quick as they emerged, but backlinks will alway exist and so will their power.

Social Signals Are Nonetheless A Lot Less Powerful Than Some Seo Gurus Claim

I don't have to collect an enormous amount of data to realise this. I am going to give a simple example by comparing a highly shared blog post with one of my own brand internet sites that never ever gets shared on any of the important social media web-sites.

We are doing a search for http://www.google.com/search?q="skinny+body+care"&pws=0. Worldwide search results for "Skinny Body Care": 1.7 million, so this is a highly competitive keyword.

On page three it is possible to find the review of Business For Home with a total of 1.2k Facebook likes and 1,213 Facebook shares. I know that Ted doesn't spend any time on backlinking , so this url only has backlinks on social network websites.

On page 2 you are able to discover my own website with no social sharing at all and this url only has a few hundred backlinks that I've created by submitting articles to article directories and blog sites. I am presently no longer doing any backlinking for this website because I don't have the time for it.

A big part of the traffic on businessforhome.org is actually coming from Facebook. So if Google genuinely considers social signals as a very critical seo strategy nowadays, the url I mentioned earlier would be significantly higher in the serps. But it's not... okay, I admit that this is just one particular example and it doesn't clarify why your website has been hit by the Penguin or not, but it is obvious that using social signals for seo purposes will never outweigh the core ingredients of a successful search engine optimization campaign.

This is what you will always need to do to rank in Google:

Build an easy-to-remember and trustworthy brand name. This will increase the quantity of direct visits to your website and build a relationship with your visitors. You also have to develop into an authority website so that other web sites naturally commence to link your internet site.

Content and keyword research will always remain by far the most essential thing in search engine optimization. Hence, you will need to update your website with new facts regularly. A website without new content looks dead to Google, so they will place it in a coffin and bury it.

Whenever you are backlinking, make sure that your anchor text varies, but also stays on topic, for instance use "online marketing" instead of "internet marketing" for approximately half of your backlinks. Link to websites in exactly the same niche as much as possible.

Don't neglect the power of video marketing. YouTube links are very beneficial for your search engine optimization campaign and also drive quite a bit of traffic to your web pages. And there are many more traffic generating video web sites out there. (Metacafe, Dailymotion, Vimeo...)

If you choose to focus on social signals, you'll should get shares and likes on a regular basis and not just generating hundreds of them in a single time. If you're not consistent in your social media sharing, your web site will probably not receive a high Google ranking. A short term social signals strategy will have a negative effect on your rankings. Remember unnatural backlinks? Soon we'll also have unnatural social signals.

There are nevertheless more than 200 factors that Google uses to rank web-sites, for instance keyword density, meta tags and title tags, internal link structure, url structure, bounce rate and user-friendliness.

Bottom line: don't try to create your personal theories if you feel like you do not know enough about world wide web marketing and also don't just blindly follow the search engine optimization gurus. Just like Rome, the web wasn't built in 1 day and for that reason no update whatsoever will ever modify the way the world wide web works. In regarding to using social signals for seo purposes: try out a few things for yourself (the more social signals you generate, the more traffic you will receive anyway), but I will certainly never buy products that claim to shoot me all the way to the top of Google.




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