By Jens Holvoet


In this blog post I clarify why you should not put too much time and effort in utilizing social signals for seo purposes. The Google Penguin update of April 2012 offered search engine optimization gurus once again the opportunity to start endless debates concerning the future of Search engine optimization. We're now June three and I honestly find it fairly amusing how the internet marketing industry is coping with this new update.

The Penguin Update And Social Signals

Each time Matt Cutts announces a new update like the Google Panda updates and the most recent Penguin update a huge tsunami of opinions emerge on this wonderful place called the web. Nevertheless, as we all know opinions on the web from time to time develop into facts and we need to ensure that we don't jump into conclusions based on what some people say.

Soon after each and every new algorithm change search engine optimization gurus rapidly commence to produce products that can enable you to to beat your competitors, in this case they want to enable you to to kick the Penguin's ass. They let you know that they've spent a whole lot of their valuable time on researching how the update has affected their web pages and what you can do to "recover" from it (in case your websites took a hit). They gathered a bunch of data of which you naturally cannot check if it's real data or not and form a conclusion regarding the recent update. So how to recover from the update? Well, their conclusion is basic: just purchase their new wonderful online marketing tool that will bring your web-site back to the top of the serps (search engine results pages). But how the hell do you know that these products and information and facts are actually useful?

Concerning The Search Engine Optimization Social Signals Hype

There is currently a huge buzz regarding social signals going on. Right after the Penguin update numerous search engine optimization gurus claimed that the amount of backlinks generated by social media internet websites would turn out to be so essential for seo that you really should mostly focus on your social signals now. Not surprisingly these are exactly the same people that are now selling tools that may help you to create more and better targeted Facebook likes, re-Tweets, Google+ shares... some of them even claim that old backlinking approaches died after the recent update. Hahahaha. Okay, I had my laugh, let's be serious now: the world wide web was built via backlinking. There's no way that social media shares is going to be a lot more critical for search engine optimization than all the other search engine optimization methods. Social media web sites are a product of the net and these websites can disappear just as rapid as they emerged, but backlinks will alway exist and so will their power.

Social Signals Are Still A Great Deal Less Powerful Than Some Seo Gurus Claim

I do not need to gather an enormous amount of information to realise this. I'm going to give a basic example by comparing a highly shared weblog post with one of my personal brand web pages that never ever gets shared on any of the important social media web sites.

We're 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 web sites.

On page 2 you'll be 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 weblog sites. I am currently no longer creating backlinks for this web-site 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 truly considers social signals as a very crucial seo strategy nowadays, the url I mentioned earlier would be significantly higher in the serps. But it is not... okay, I admit that this is just one particular example and it doesn't clarify why your web site has been hit by the Penguin or not, but it's obvious that utilizing social signals for seo purposes will under no circumstances outweigh the core ingredients of a successful search engine optimization campaign.

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

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

Content and keyword research will always remain the most vital thing in seo. Hence, you will have to update your website with new information and facts regularly. A website without new content looks dead to Google, so they will put it in a coffin and bury it.

Whenever you are creating backlinks, be 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 the same niche as much as possible.

Do not neglect the power of video marketing. YouTube links are very beneficial for your search engine optimization campaign and also drive a whole lot of traffic to your internet sites. And there are many more traffic generating video web-sites out there. (Metacafe, Dailymotion, Vimeo...)

If you wish 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 will also have unnatural social signals.

There are still 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 develop your own theories if you feel like you don't know enough about world-wide-web marketing and also do not just blindly follow the seo gurus. Just like Rome, the internet wasn't built in 1 day and therefore no update whatsoever will ever change 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 ever invest in merchandise that claim to shoot me all the way to the top of Google.




About the Author:



0 komentar