It is hard to deny that social media can play a pivotal role in your seo strategy.  Developing one way links is a critical component of every search engine marketers’ strategy and social media provides an excellent platform. As google continues to incorporate real time results from twitter, facebook and other social media sites, it is important to include these strategies into your daily seo activities.

If the end goal for seo marketers is to develop one way links pointing back to a particular website, our objective through social media is to obtain as many links as possible in as many places as possible on the most authoritative websites possible through content syndication and having your content “picked up”.  Produce sensational content and watch your link profile grow. Incredible content has a way of virally spreading through the web and providing you with an incredible amount of one way inbound links.

Social Media Outreach and Link Acquisition are actually very similar in practice.  There are 2 ways to acquire links:

1. Identify the major influencers in your category, figure out how to contact them and persuade them to mention your product. In this instance, “persuade” usually means, “pay or provide free product”.  This is no different than paying for an important link, such as the $299 inclusion fee for inclusion into yahoo’s directory.

2.  Develop sensational content that people want to share with one another. Think “The Chronicles of Narnia” and “Evolution of Dance” on Youtube.  At last count, Evolution of Dance was indexed 25,600,000 times in google.

I’ve never been great at the first tactic.  I find it very difficult to actually get the end result of mentions, articles, and links.  It is extremely time consuming and there seem to be more losses than wins.

Developing sensational content, I can do that!

We recently developed and executed a sensational piece of content that coincided with a new product line release from a major brand.  Our content headline was sensational, we included photography and the story was enticing.  We launched this content at the same time the major brand was set to release their new product line.

Our story was picked up by 3 major twitter users.  For the next week, if you searched for that collection, google displayed these tweets as 1 and 2 in natural search. Now 6 weeks later, this page still ranks on page 1 for the selected term.  Google indexed this content 438 times.

Three weeks later, we developed another piece of sensational content for this client.  We saw a 20% increase in traffic over the next two weeks and google indexed this article on 4,310 websites.  How long would it take you to acquire 4,310 links?

Social Media is an excellent link building tool and should be in every search engine marketer’s arsenal.  Our recent successes underscore the necessary importance of taking this media for what it’s worth – developing one way inbound links to your site.

We’re constantly trying new and innovative tactics with our clients.  We’ll keep you apprised of our successes.

Here are a few good articles on this topic.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/13/technology/internet/13blog.html
http://blogs.forrester.com/groundswell/2009/03/by-josh-bernoff.html

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