Social Media is not a replacement for Effective SEO
In untrained hands, social media can effectively blast your company url all over God’s creation: that is not effective SEO. While it gets your link out there it’s also link dumping (1)
Getting Eyeballs on your site
Eyeballs on your site beats no eyeballs on your site, but if you’re going to get any real traction, you’ve got to keep the followers you get to follow. If I had all the twitter followers who followed and quickly unfollowed I’d have tens of thousands of followers by now.
Redefining Effective Use of Social Media
To use *a* social media property, one tool at a time is not going to get near as many eyeballs on your site as if you hook them together using an aggregator. The graphic below depicts how to do this and it will “get eyeballs on your site” but will they buy anything?
Then there is Google’s consideration of a bounce rate (2)…
What this does is get tons of people exposed to your message, for a few seconds… long enough for them to see that you aren’t really going to join their MLM or that you weren’t what they thought you might be.
If you post to Stumbleupon and immediately get 100 “page views” to your post, look again, look at your Google Analytics report: of the 100 you might get 4 that stayed on your site for more than 12 seconds.
Does a 12 second visit constitute a “real visitor”?
If someone clicks and clicks away in less than 30 seconds, were they going to buy anything?
Participation (Follow Me On Twitter)
Participation is what makes a blog, a blog.
Participation is the sole reason Google favors blogs over static websites.
In case you are one of the people who don’t “get it” a blog will beat the living hell out of a static website in Google ranking everyday (assuming both are new sites). A static website has ZERO chance of outranking a blog.
If you are attempting to compete against an existing website that already has Google trust, and you keep hammering away with a blog, you will rank right next to that competitor… for as long as you post. Stop posting and you disappear.
What makes social media effective is the two way participation, that IS the reason Google favors them. No participation and you’ve turned a blog into a static website.
So I’m doing my penance. I’m unhooking my twitter from most of the networks illustrated in the graphic
When I first started using Social Media I kept finding web 2.0 properties that allowed, even encouraged posting to my personal Facebook Profile, my wall. I learned that according to Facebook’s terms of service our personal profiles are not to be used for commercial purposes, that’s what a Company Facebook Page is for.
Graphic Courtesy Daniel W Crampton of FriendFeed Fun
This flow chart of how to integrate your participation of social media to maximize your company or your brand image in the public eye.
But I signed up for everything under the sun! When I post to one, I post to a half dozen or more.
End result?
My personal Facebook profile gets all my tweets in stereo or triplicate. Effectively making many friends ignore my posts (unless of course they have a vested interest in the services I offer: Local Search Ranking for brick n mortar small businesses)
So here is my effort to sin no more.
I want people to tweet me as if it were my telephone.
Tweet Me, I’ll respond
I want people to post to my Facebook Fan Page Wall.
I want participation, that means I’m going to have to go to almost full time moderating my pages to keep the MLM offers or googleads posts or forex offers from filling up my sites.
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1) Link spam (wikipedia definition)
Brian D. Davison, associate professor at Lehigh University, defines link spam (which he calls “nepotistic links”) as “… links between pages that are present for reasons other than merit.”
Link spam takes advantage of link-based ranking algorithms, such as Google’s PageRank algorithm, which gives a higher ranking to a website the more other highly ranked websites link to it.
2) Bounce Rate
From Google’s Help Section:
Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality – a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site and convert.
Bounce Rate as defined by Wikipedia
Bounce rate
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bounce rate (sometimes confused with exit rate) is a term used in web site traffic analysis. It essentially represents the percentage of initial visitors to a site who “bounce” away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site.
The formula used to calculate bounce rate is: Bounce Rate = Total Number of Visits Viewing One Page / Total Number of Visits
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