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.

I’m sure you already know my name, the following are the answers to youre questions sir.

1. i am available through email and chat only.
2. i can’t do phone calls to someone in north america.
3. The SEO software that we have is SENUKE.
4. yes sir i am working 20 hours perm week.

what kind od SEO task i will be doing for you sir?

I am looking forward for your responce.

Since I’m looking for someone who can do a bit of article writing, and content editing, I decided his English wasn’t quite up to par.   Don’t get me wrong, it’s not terrible…heck I’ve seen much, much worse from outsourcers…it’s just not good enough for my needs.

So I emailed First Page Web Search and told them about my dilemma.  They were completely cool with it and offered to assign me a replacement VA that had better English.

A day later, enter “Gerlyn”.  She seems better from my initial conversation with her.

For her first task, I wanted her to use SENuke with one of my client’s sites.  Since I’ve never used this software myself, I asked her what it could do as she wanted some direction.

SEnuke can make automated backlinking, social bookmarking, linkwheel, article submission, rss feeds submission, video submission and keyword research. This can make the work fast as it is automated.

Perfect.  So I gave her a list of page/keyword combinations via a shared Google Doc as well as 5 articles I had saved from a previous campaign.  Gerlyn said she’d get to work ASAP.

For my next update I’ll talk about how Gerlyn did on her first task with SENuke.

1. Keep the Content Fresh
   • At the least, a new post or page every week is great to keep the search engine bots continually crawling your site.  Plus the more pages your domain has the better.   The total Google PR for your entire domain can not exceed the # of pages.  So if you have a 1 page site you’ll never have higher than PR 1.
   • Yes I realize there’s irony in this point because I don’t update this blog nearly that often.  But I suppose that’s because this isn’t an income stream for me, I’m just doing it for fun, so I don’t really care too much about its SEO.
   • If you’re using a blogging platform, remember to use tags, as each tag creates yet another page.
2. Find Forums to Post in that have Do-Follow Signature Links
   • Be the first to respond to new threads so your sig will appear near the top of the page
   • Try to write useful, respectful comments, and not obvious spam…you know who you are…silly spammers
3. Submit your RSS Feeds to Directories
   • Search engines love RSS feeds, probably because they are great followers of Tip #1 (Keep the Content Fresh), and constantly updating
   • Two of the major ones are Feedage.com and Feedagg.com
4. Use ‘title’ and ‘alt’ HTML Tags for Images
   • This way you’ll get bonus traffic from search engine image searches, such as Google and Bing (my new favorite).
5. Social Bookmarking Rules
   • It’s powerful because each bookmark not only creates multiple backlinks (due to the tags), but also because of the “social” aspect your bookmark could appear on a “top bookmarks” page (with high PR) if other users vote or submit it as well.
   • With SocialAdr your webpages can be bookmarked (to 15 or so of the major social bookmarking services) up to 420 time per month.  And that’s just with the ‘Free’ account!
6. Keyword Research is ‘Key’
   • This is one of the (if not THE) most important parts of an effective SEO campaign.  Too many people rush through it and don’t take the time to realize either (a) there’s weak traffic for the keywords they’re targeting or (b) the competition is insane and it’s virtually impossible for them to get on Page 1 of Google.
   • I use a handy app called Micro Niche Finder – it saves a lot of time compared to using the free tools
   • The free method is simply using the Google External Keyword Tool to find how much traffic each keyword gets and Google (search for the keyword “in quotes”) to find how much competition you have.   I prefer > 1000 searches / month with less than 20,000 competition.  But there’s a lot of wiggle room in those numbers.