Social media involves many people from around the world “talking” about a webpage from many different social sites.   The search engines know that the more “social” activity they can pick up about a specific URL, the more effect this should have on that URL’s rankings.  And in the past couple years nearly every major Google algorithm change has further embraced social media.

I realize that I’m fortunate I decided to create a social media service in 2009, rather than an article marketing service, or a directory submission service, or any other type of SEO service that is becoming less and less effective.

Here’s a few myths that I hear quite often:

There’s no benefit in having multiple backlinks from the same domain

This is one of my favorite.  People get brainwashed on forums like the Warrior Forum, that backlinks are only beneficial if they’re doFollow and from different class-C IP addresses.  Maybe that used to be true, I don’t know.  What I do know is that the core concept behind “social media”, is having multiple accounts on the same site promoting your URLs.  When something goes “viral”, does it receive a single Tweet and a single Google +1 click and a single Facebook Like?  Hell no.  It receives thousands of similar social signals, from all over the place.

Furthermore, certain social media sites, such as social bookmarking sites, use “votes” to help promote URLs to the “top votes” pages or even the homepages.  And these pages are often high traffic and high PR.

So by getting multiple social media backlinks from the same domains, your URL is not only saying to search engines “Hey, look how popular I am!  It’s almost as if I’m viral!”, but it is also appearing on high traffic / high PR pages.  How is that not absolutely ideal for SEO purposes?

NoFollow links are useless

This myth isn’t specific to social media, but to SEO as a whole.  Recent research has shown that a healthy mix of doFollow / noFollow links is better for search engine rankings than having only doFollow links.

Wait a sec…what?  So even though Google (Matt Cutts) proposed the idea of the nofollow hyperlink attribute, an idea that has been widely adopted all over the web, they don’t even abide by it themselves?

That’s just ludicrous!

Or is it?

Here’s my take on it.  Originally the nofollow attribute was intended to help reduce spam.  Webmasters could use the attribute so that would-be spammers would be less inclined to leave spammy comments, because the backlinks they received from those comments would have no SEO value.  But…as more and more sites starting using nofollow attributes, the percentage of “legit” available backlinks become lower and lower.  That means the % of links Google can use in their ranking algorithm is/was shrinking.  It’s only natural to believe that if your input variables become fewer, the quality and accuracy of your algorithm reduces.

If you think about a “natural” progression of backlinks to a specific webpage, what would this consist of?  By “natural” I mean you’re not promoting your own webpage and nobody else is doing any SEO work for you.  The internet world has discovered your webpage and, because it’s so awesome, people feel obliged, without incentive, to promote it.  In this case, you might get a bunch of Tweets, Likes, social bookmarks, microblog mentions, social networking status mentions, Web 2.0 posts, blog posts, press releases, articles, etc. etc.  Now what type of links would these be?  Would they be ALL doFollow?  Hell now.  They’d be a healthy mix of doFollow/noFollow.

So in Google’s eyes, sites that have a healthy mix of doFollow/noFollow backlinks haven’t tried to “game” their rankings.  It’s likely they obtained their publicity honestly and naturally, compared to sites with ONLY doFollow links that are obviously using grey hat SEO techniques.

I want to create my own social media accounts and only promote my own URLs

Although I don’t hear people making this exact statement, I get the feeling from reading forums and seeing the different social media software offerings, that this mindset is very popular.

I look at it exactly the opposite.

Let me use an example.  A recent piece of desktop software I saw on the Warrior Forum made me reflect on this philosophy.  Here’s what it does:

1. Creates a Hotmail email address
2. Creates social media accounts (you have to manually enter CAPTCHA unless you have one of the popular paid services setup)
3. Posts a bookmark to the accounts it just setup

I’m not even going to talk about the fact that it’s risky to repeat these steps a large number of times from the same IP, as the software doesn’t utilize proxies.

What I want to talk about is how this process is the opposite of what you should be trying to accomplish with social media.  Rather than setting up accounts, for yourself, that will only ever contain your own URLs, what you should be striving for is having other people promote your URLs to their accounts.  Then, and only then, will your social media campaigns appear “natural”.

Now if you’re wondering how you can get other people to promote your links, here’s a couple different ways:

• Design an attractive website and write quality content that engages visitors and encourages them to spread the word out of sheer love for what you’ve created.  (this is difficult for a lot of people to accomplish, but is ideal if you can make it happen)
• Pay people to spread the word about your pages (SocialAdr is one service that does this very effectively)

Hopefully this post helps clear up a bit of the misinformation that’s out there related to SEO, link building, and social media in particular.

• Get Twitter followers
• Get Facebook likes
• Get MySpace followers
• Get StumbleUpon followers
• Get Digg followers
• Get visitors to ANY website

He guessed that it wouldn’t be very much, maybe like 10% max.

Well, surprisingly it’s much higher than that!

While I haven’t seen any data from Google for the click-through rate averages for each position, there’s data floating around from AOL that could easily be applied to any search engine.

• Ranking #1 gets 42.1 % of clicks
• Ranking #2 gets 11.9 % of clicks
• Ranking #3 gets 8.5 % of clicks
• Ranking #4 gets 6.1 % of clicks
• Ranking #5 gets 4.9 % of clicks
• Ranking #6 gets 4.1 % of clicks
• Ranking #7 gets 3.4 % of clicks
• Ranking #8 gets 3.0 % of clicks
• Ranking #9 gets 2.8 % of clicks
• Ranking #10 gets 3.0 % of clicks

This means that if a keyword gets 100 searches a month, the #1 result will get 42 clicks whereas the #2 result will only get 12!   Pretty big difference.

Great example of why it’s so important to be ranked #1

Even better, if you’re #1 for organic search results, Google Maps listings, AND AdWords, you can completely dominate the competition.

An excellent SEO service I’ve used in the past is Mariah’s SEO Blaster.  She’s very skilled at helping local and global businesses get ranked highly in all 3 of the above categories.

I recently figured out a neat trick for getting a YouTube video to show up on Page 1 of Google search results.  We all know that YouTube = Google, so that makes this technique even more powerful than if it was done with some random video site that may be shut down or Google may someday decide to ignore.

Disclaimer:

This trick used to work great before the YouTube blog was changed to a Blogger platform.  Now there’s a “NOFOLLOW” attribute on the comment hyperlinks, so it’s arguable how effective this is anymore.  But if you want to try it…give ‘er!   Report back if it seems to work.

Here’s what ya gotta do:

1. Create a YouTube profile, if you haven’t already.
2. Upload a video that’s been keyword-optimized for the Google search phrase you’re targeting.  This means the title of the video should be your long-tail keyword.  Like “make money online fast”.
3. Create a Blogger profile (Frank’s is just an example), if you haven’t already.  Add a backlink in the “About Me” section which goes to your YouTube profile URL.  Again, use the keyword you’re targetting.
4. Visit the YouTube Blog.
5. Find a story to comment on.
6. For the “Comment As” field select “Google Account”.
7. Write  a respectful, relevant comment.
8. You should be prompted to log into your Blogger account when you click “Preview” or “Post Comment”
9. Notice a few things,
   • The Blog page has PR of 9…that’s HUGE!
10. Wait for your video to appear in Google search results.
11. ?
12. ?
13. Profit

Done and done.

SocialMarker is a free tool that I use fairly often.  It makes it a heck of a lot easier to submit my sites to social bookmarking services, than if I was to do it manually.

After my negative review of SocialBot yesterday I figured I should discuss what I do find useful for social bookmarking.

So why do I use SocialMarker?

• It helps me get traffic.
• It helps me get a lot of backlinks, some from high PR sites.
• It works with many of the popular social bookmarking services…51 in total!
• It’s free!

Now let me explain how it all works:

1. First I load up whatever page I want to submit in FireFox.  I’ll use im-fun.com as an example.
2. I have a “SocialMarker” bookmark in my Bookmarks Toolbar.  The SocialMarker site explains how to get this setup.
3. I click the “SocialMarker” bookmark.
4. Another tab appears with SocialMarker loaded and the Title and URL of my page auto-populated.
5. I manually enter text (a description of the page) and appropriate tags.
6. I select the social bookmarking services that I want to submit to (I usually choose the “Dofollow” and “Best” ones, not all of them).
7. I click “Submit”
8. SocialMarker loads up a frame that opens up pages for each service, with buttons at the top to navigate between services
   • 
9. I then go from service to service, logging in (often I’m already logged in from a prior session), and submitting my page by dragging and dropping each field from the helpful bar at the bottom of the screen.  Often SocialMarker is smart enough to populate these fields without me having to do anything.
   • 

So, although there’s still some manual effort involved, SocialMarker does make it easer to submit sites to social bookmarking services.  And it sure doesn’t hurt that it’s FREE.  I’ll keep using it until I find something better or win the lottery and can finally afford to spend more money on internet marketing tools.

One last thing I should mention – I also use the Tag Format Converter tool (or the downloadable spreadsheet) that I wrote.  There’s 5 different tag formats that social bookmarking services require; you can’t just use the default comma-separated format for each service.  Yes, it sucks ass.  Hopefully one day those social bookmarking bigwigs will decide on a standard format.  But that’s just wishful thinking

Today I’m going to talk about Free Traffic System, which touts itself as being able to give people “free targeted website traffic in any niche”.

Well first of all, as you probably found out when you were 5 years old, nothing in the world is entirely free (except bad advice and in some cities drinks for ladies on Tuesdays).  So although this site does offer a free service, they also encourage you to become a Pro Member and get additional benefits and features.

That being said…this is what the Free Traffic System is all about:

Article Submission

1. You write a unique article (at least 450 words) that isn’t plagiarized or already posted word-for-word on your own site.
2. You SPIN it, which involves putting [spin][/spin] around synonyms throughout your article.
   • Here’s an example sentence: One day I [spin]went|drove|walked|ran[/spin] to the [spin]store|market|grocery store|drug store|shopping center[/spin].
   • So as you can see, because I spun a phrase 4x and another 5x, that creates 20 (4×5) possible sentences out of a single sentence
   • If you do that once or twice in each paragraph throughout your article, you have turned your single unique article into many unique articles.
3. You determine appropriate keywords for your article (preferably ones you’re targeting in your marketing campaign)
4. You determine appropriate URLs for the keywords which you’ve embedded in your article
5. You enter everything above into Free Traffic System
6. You type in category keywords to find blogs that would be suitable for your article
7. You select 30 of these blogs
8. Over the course of the next few days, your article is automatically submitted to these 30 blogs!
9. The entire process typically takes me about half an hour

Article Reception

Now this is functionality you could use if you want your niche WordPress blog to run on auto-pilot.   It’s basically the inverse of the Article Submission functionality that I described above.  Note that it’s completely optional and my guess is that most folks just do the article submission.

1. You create a new WordPress user that has the “AUTHOR” role
2. You enter details into Free Traffic System about your blog, such as:
   • Title
   • Category
   • URL
   • Username
   • Password
3. You sit back and wait while new articles get posted to your blog on a regular basis (I find the frequency depends on how unique your “Category” / niche is)

Pros of Free Traffic System

• Easy to use once you figure out how spinning and keywords work (they do provide an instructional video)
• A single article gets unique-ifide (yes, that’s definitely a word!) and submitted to 30 blogs for FREE!
• Great for getting traffic
• Great for getting one-way backlinks to your site with anchor-text keywords (in other words…SEO crystal meth)
• Great for getting unique content, on auto-pilot, posted to your blog

Cons of Free Traffic System

• Could be a bit confusing at first
• Article Reception functionality doesn’t allow you to specific WordPress categories for the posts (I’ve had to manually move posts between categories)

Overall, as far as cost/benefit analysis goes, I highly, highly recommend Free Traffic System.  It sure aint perfect, but…come on…it’s FREE!  Plus I don’t know of any other way to get articles unique-ified and submitted to so many blogs without a whole lot of effort.

If you haven’t heard of StumbleUpon, they are one of many social bookmarking websites, but they are unique in the fact that they offer users the ability to just browse or “stumble” through a never-ending list of sites recommended by other users.  Pretty cool idea.

I read about their new product, called SU.PR (pronounced “super”), from the blog of Tim Ferriss (the author of “The 4-Hour Workweek”).

Well apparently SU.PR will allow users to do the following:

• Submit their content to StumbleUpon’s 7.9 million users with each post
• Have their best content showcased in a right-hand sidebar for each page that’s linked to (here’s an example)
• Get suggestions for optimal posting times:  get more traffic per post
• Schedule as many tweets or posts as they want, for any time
• See their click-through statistics in real-time
• See retweets for each post, including the biggest influencers (with rankings)
• Post to Twitter and Facebook at the same time, with more platforms to come…
• Use their own short URL (i.e. www.mysite.com/abc123) instead of something like bit.ly

Dang, that sounds pretty bad-ass.  Apparently Tim said while testing SU.PR he started receiving up to 10% of his unique traffic from it, and got 24,000 visits to a single post in 24 hours.  Holy smokes!

Here’s a sample of the SU.PR dashboard:

Well if you’re excited and want to get in on the action ASAP, they’re giving out free beta testing accounts for the next few weeks.  Here’s how to get one:

1. Go here http://su.pr/
2. Click “request one” if you don’t have an “invite code”
3. Follow StumbleUpon on Twitter to get the code when they periodically release new ones

I’m the guy who has NEVER (no lie) set his FaceBook “status” because I didn’t want all my friends knowing where I was or what I was doing 24 hours a day.  As far as I could tell, Twitter was just like a stand-alone verion of the FaceBook “status” functionality.

Lately I’ve started to realize that Twitter can be an incredibly powerful internet marketing tool.  I also feel bad for people who want to use it for its original intention (micro-blogging), but are being bombarded by IM-centric messages and users.

Here’s why I think it can be such a useful marketing tool:

Finding people with similar interests

• The search functionality is great for finding other users with similar interests
• If you have a site centered around a specific niche (say iPod Nanos), it’s easy to find other people with the same interests
• Simply follow someone and there’s a good chance they’ll follow you back

Learning about your niche

• If you aren’t sure about something, just Tweet and ask a question; there’s a good chance you’ll get a response

Promoting products & getting TRAFFIC

• This is probably the best part of Twitter…for people doing IM
• If you just wrote an article on your site with an affiliate link, simply send a Tweet to your followers with the URL to let them know
• Most likely you’ll see immediate traffic (depending on your methods for tracking traffic)
• If you have hundreds or even thousands of followers, your web server better be able to handle it!

This is what I use for submitting my sites to website directories.  I know there’s a debate about how useful “directories” are for improving search engine ranking, but it’s hard to argue with the benefits of getting a bunch of 1-way backlinks for free.

Some people complain that directories are a waste of time because “they’re sooooo 1999″ (ie. Web 1.0) and not hip and trendy like social bookmarking sites.  I don’t subscribe to that jazz.

Here’s the features that I like about Directory Submitter:

• Ability to see and sort by Google PageRank in the list of available directories (there’s 350!).  I only choose the ones with PR of 4 or higher.
• Can create a “project” for each of your sites and submit them all
• Tracking of which directory you’ve submitted each site to

This is the shit that annoys me:

• When you delete a directory it re-appears in the list the next time the app opens
• No way to just sit back and let the submissions happen automatically; you have to manually change between directories and projects

The complaints above may simply be because I’m too much of a cheap-ass to buy the full version so I’m stuck with limited functionality.  Anyways, I haven’t found anything better yet, but if you have let me know!