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.

Rumor has it that the Panda update came about from a focus group that Google held.  They had real humans evaluating actual websites and giving their opinions on different metrics.  The results of this group were then translated into a programming algorithm that was encorporated into the ranking calculation engine.

I’ve done a bunch of research and experiments on my own rankings since this update, as well as reading what guys a lot smarter than myself have published, and here’s what I’ve come up with:

Domain quality is now important again

In the “May Day” update prior to Panda, a chance was made that allowed individual pages to rank higher on their own merit, regardless of the trust value or strength of their domain.  It looks like with Panda that’s been reversed and now the collective value of ALL pages for a domain is taken into considering.  This is the main reason why EzineArticles rankings dropped and they’ve lost a lot of traffic.

What does this mean to me?

• It’s no longer beneficial to add hundreds or thousands of low-quality content pages, as they’ve drag down the rankings of your entire domain
• It’s better to build backlinks to your home page AND inner pages, rather than just your home page.  This tells Google that many of your pages have value and other sites “like” them.

Sites are evaluated monthly

Websites are evaluated every month.  If you make an on-site or off-site SEO change today, it’ll take about a month for Google to recognize it and adjust your rankings accordingly.

What does this mean to me?

• If you’re experimenting with multiple link building services and techniques at the same time, it’s gonna be nearly impossible to know which ones helped and which ones hurt your rankings.  Also, it’s not productive to try a service for 1 week, assume it doesn’t work, and cancel your membership.  Then 3 weeks later you’ll just be surprised to see your rankings change and not attribute it to the service you had canceled.

Here’s what the order form looks like:

Like I said, super simple.

1. Use the top slider to select how many backlinks you’d like (the more you want, the cheaper they get per link).
2. Optionally choose radio buttons for “indexed links only”, “dofollow only”, or “PR1+”, keeping in mind that each option costs extra
3. Enter your keywords
4. Enter your URLs

Done!

Once you’ve placed an order and its been completed (mine took about 20 minutes), you can view the data on your “Complete Projects” page:

As you can see even though I paid for 2000 links I received 2420 of ‘em and the Indexation rate was 45%.

The “download links” hyperlink lets you download a CSV file that contains, for each link:

• URL
• PR
• Indexed (yes, no)
• DoFollow (yes, no)
• Keyword
• Target URL

This spreadsheet is super handy for loading into other link building systems to further boost the SEO-juice of your new One Hour Backlinks.

WINNING.

As the site says to do, I emailed “admin(at)firstpagewebsearch(dot)com” to request a part-time SEO VA, which costs a super-affordable $37.50 for 20 hours a week.

The company owner/manager, Jake, replied:

Right now, we do need one week confirmation payment. This covers the two days trial and 5 days work. This is a policy we implemented since we had previous clients who runaway after the two days trial. We hope you understand. If in case you’re not happy with the service, we can arrange a new VA or we refund the whole amount.

Please pay using the link below:

(PayPal link removed)

I will then forward the VA contact details after we receive the payment.

So I completed the PayPal transaction and the next day received this email:

The “New Client Pack” had the following 3 files, which are pretty self explanatory.  The “Welcome Kit” is just a 1-page PDF with contact info for “First Page Web Search” departments.

So far so good!  My next update will be about my first impressions and communication with my new VA named “Jemelo”.

So I’ve religiously logged my time for a couple weeks now (using a desktop widget from Paymo.biz), and come to the following conclusions -

Virtual Assistant Providers

Job posting boards

Outsourcing companies

Well look no further…

Meet Traffic Travis.  

Here’s how it works:

First, you setup a “Project”.   This requires entering the name of the site you want to track, it’s URL, the search engines you want to use, and a list of keywords.  You can even enter competitor’s sites to see how they compare against your keywords, over time.

Next, you click “Start Update” and Traffic Travis goes to work.  Very quickly you see results coming in.   Whenever the current ranking beats the previous best ranking, a row is colored yellow.  And similarly, when the current ranking becomes worse, a row is colored blue.  Pretty handy for easily seeing where you stand.

Finally, Traffic Travis tracks all your historical ranking data.  You even get a cool graph or can print/export the data to BMP / HTML files.

If this was all the Traffic Travis could do, I’d be satisfied.

But it’s not…not even close.

Here’s a list of other features, some of which I haven’t even tried yet:

• Keyword research
• Backlink checker (also shows PageRank, noFollow, anchor text, and IP of each backlink…pimp!)
• PPC analysis
• Page analysis (how good is your on-page SEO?)
• SEO analysis (how competitive is certain keywords…for the top 20 listings in Google)

Last but not least, it just feels solid.  As a software developer, I can recognize good code when I see it.  For whatever reason, in the internet marketing world there’s a lot of bloated, slow, buggy, and visually unappealing…shit.  But Traffic Travis is sleek, slick, and sexy.  It’s no wonder that it’s had more than 100,000 downloads on Download.com and is considered by many to be the most popular SEO application EVER.

Well what the heck are ya waiting for?  Go get the best Google position checker (and bask in the glory of all the extra features you didn’t even know you wanted)!