Is Social Media Stealing Your Links
By Colm Flanagan
The growth of social media shows no signs of letting up. It has provided a huge amount of opportunities for all search engine marketers and something, that if embraced, can add huge amounts of free traffic to any website. Never before have we been able listen in such detail to our consumer’’s most inner thoughts and gather key insights into what they are really looking for. But social media is not without it’’s challenges.
Before social media, a great way to generate both traffic and links was to write a killer blog posts. There are a number of blog post types used for this method:
- Link Bait: This is when a post is written with a target market in mind and whose sole aim is to attract links. A great example in the SEO industry is when people write blog posts with the shock title “SEO is Dead”. This is always a great way to generate some links.
- Resource Page: Another great way to build links with blog posts is to create a huge tutorial that will benefit a certain user base i.e. you have identified a problem in your market and provided a solution.
- Flame Post: Lastly, one of the more unpleasant ways to gather links is to create a flame war with another poster. This basically means you insult them, disagree with them or in general, just get their attention by any means necessary.
All of these blog tactics used to generate both comments and links. But social media is and has changed that. The conversation no longer takes place on the page. Instead, users are likely to tweet your post, send it via Facebook or social bookmark it. The comments do come, but on other platforms. This can result in a little bit of traffic from social media sites, but does little to improve your keyword rank, as it doesn”t produce any links.
The key to staying on top is being ahead of the curve. Once the conversation switched from the blog post to social media vehicles, link builders should be taking account of that in their strategy. There are countless web2.0 properties like Tumblr, Squidoo, Hubspot to name but a few. Link builders now have LOTS of different places to seed their content and create high value properties themselves. A lot of the web2.0 properties can be integrated with twitter and facebook. Done correctly, you can build out an army of these sites all focused on one keyword.
To succeed at link building, you have to constantly be aware of how the web landscape is changing and how it affects your strategy. Don”t let social media steal your links, fight back and use it to generate an army of high value sites.
About The Author
Traffic Wizard writes about a lot of SEO topics including Link Development. Find out more at Searchbrat.com
