Social vs SEO

The End of Search Without Social - Webinar. PostRank and the Importance of Social Engagement Metrics to SEO. There are many sites that curate content and links on the Web, including many blogs and a number of social sites that do it through submissions by their members, who can also vote upon those submissions.

The inventors of PostRank came up with an algorithmic approach to rank articles and blog posts and other content on the Web, and present it to people based upon those rankings. I’ve found a patent application at the USPTO that provides some insights and details on how their approach worked. Google acquired PostRank last June, as was announced on the PostRank blog on June 3, 2011. Given Google’s increasing move towards looking at more social signals for the potential ranking of content shared by others, it’s worth wondering how this technology might be used by Google, and what the PostRank team might be bringing to the effort. PostRank Co-founder Ilya Grigorik, who now appears to be a web performance analyst with Google, noted in the post announcing the acquisition: Abstract. Building Awesome Relationships For Links, Likes, and Love.

Link building isn't really link building.

It's relationship building. Links are just the proof of the relationship, as are the tweets, likes, sales… relationship building is link building. Influencer Marketing - What it is, and Why YOU Need to be Doing it. Content marketing is an increasingly hot topic these days.

More and more people are starting to realize the potent role that high quality content plays in creating visibility for your brand on the Internet. Seth Godin was quotes a few years back as saying "content marketing is the only marketing left". One of the biggest reasons for this is the intense competition that exists on the web today for nearly any commercial offering. For example, you can see this if you do a search on something like intitle:"lathe operation", as shown here: Even this very niche oriented term generates over 7,000 results. Content Is Not King: Key Takeaways from Amit Singhal. Posted by Adam Audette | January 31, 2012 | 10 comments The King is Dead.

Long Live the King. There’s an old adage online, by now so used up and tired I’m surprised how often it’s still envoked: content is king. I heard it whispered in 1996 by the pioneers, when it was still a fresh and novel concept, when it held promise and hope; when the web was still tiny. Content is king they said, when Google came on the scene with that clean, empty search box and bubble gum logo. For the first time, I saw this axiom get turned on its head.

“…it’s not just about content. Content WAS king. This marks a seminal change in the way Google (and the web in general) are moving: towards the social graph. More from Amit, Types of Social Media Content to Boost SEO. I’ve written often about the benefits of going viral in both content and marketing strategies.

Increasingly, however, social media content (a.k.a. viral content) does more than increase brand recognition and site traffic: it can also boost your SEO signals. As search engines pay more and more attention to social signals, going viral is rapidly becoming one of the best ways to build links, attract attention, and establish authority and legitimacy in your field. Can Social Media Activity Boost Rankings? Don’t we all want an answer to the question whether or not social media activity indeed boosts organic search ranking?

So far its been a lot of guessing and that will probably continue to be so for a while. Some have tested things, like for example yesterday Branded3 published the results of an interesting study they did. Another who tried to figure it out was Tasty Placement, who created 6 similary-sized US websites in 6 different cities. They tried to capture the average change in rankings when promoting on different social media channels. The results you can see in the infographic below.

In my view social does have an effect on ranking, but maybe not always just directly. Now this infographic is not an exact measurement, but is simply a starting point. Via Bas van den Beld Bas van den Beld is a speaker, trainer and online marketing strategist. How to Optimize 7 Popular Social Media Profiles for SEO. If you want to strengthen your personal or business brand’s visibility, then one of the top things you will want is to have strong social media profiles that rank in the top results for your name along with your website and blog.

Having a strong online reputation that is comprised of nothing but content that highlights the best about your personal or business brand will allow you to keep undesirable results at bay, such as bad online reviews or mentions. You’ve probably read lots of posts talking about how to properly optimize your social media profiles for search, and they’ve probably all sounded a little like this.

Be active – Yes, this is true. Matt Cutts: Don't Write The Epitaph For Links Yet [SMX Advanced 2012 Video] Will social signals replace links as a primary SEO signal affecting Google’s rankings?

Have social signals already replaced links in that way? That topic came up last month during the keynote conversation with Google’s Matt Cutts at our SMX Advanced conference in Seattle. Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land’s Editor-In-Chief, asked a series of link-related questions that led the conversation through topics like no-followed links, affiliate links, paid links and more. For a few years now, some SEO insiders have suggested that social signals are replacing links as a quality signal for Google’s ranking algorithm — and that refrain has become a bit more common, I’d say, in the wake of the Panda and Penguin updates. But in the video below, Cutts explains that it’s much too soon to say that links are dead. For more from SMX Advanced, see the Related Entries below.