Social media and SEO: compatible? Event review.
Tuesday, June 29th, 2010
I just came from another great Third Tuesday Calgary event. This time we had Jeff Nelson of Anduro Marketing talking about social media and SEO. Specifically, does engaging in social media help your SEO efforts? Below are some notes from the talk.
- One of the main arguments was that social media is NOT good for SEO because most of the social networking sites have a nofollow attribute in links.
- Jeff used seo-browser.com tool to parse a few social media sites including Twitter, Wikipedia, Youtube, etc.
- Results showed that neither Twitter nor Wikipedia pass the Google juice to external pages, therefore these sites were almost useless in contributing to SEO efforts.
- I sincerely believed that Twitter passes the link to your site in the right-hand sidebar (where it talks about the user). The reason for this was that I've seen a link count through SEOmoz's OpenSiteExplorer.org.
- On the other hand, YouTube had one link that actually lead to a site and passed authority (the link to your site in YouTube channel profile). Unfortunately you're not able to customize the anchor text.
- Jeff briefly talked about three characteristics of a link: anchor text, whether it passes the value (not nofollow), and the context (text content surrounding the link).
- Then Jeff went into a bit of history of when social media started to matter for SEO. He showed a list of links to resources talking about it starting in 2006. One of the articles by Rand Fishkin was the most valuable.
- Finally, Jeff got into discussing the three reasons to use social media to help your SEO: brand promotion, link bait, and viral distribution. Meaning that social media is not the best friend of SEO but can be a good buddy to hang out with sometimes.
- brand promotion: although you're not getting tons of link value from social networks, it's definitely worth participating in social media for the reason of promoting your brand with the relevant audiences.
- link bait: or developing valuable content on your site (in form of a blog post most often) that others will link back to. The emphasis is on the value of that content. Just writing frequent articles will not help. Make then infrequent, but super valuable. Here's an article Jeff shared that'll help you with creating such content.
- viral distribution: somewhat related to link bait, yet a separate reason. The goal here is to create valuable content and ensure that it's as simple as possible to pass along. Jeff gave a couple of examples of principles behind successful viral distribution. Then, we all watched "will it blend" as a great example of a viral campaign.
- Here's a couple of great links on the topic Jeff shared:
- 10 of the smartest big brands in social media, an article by mashable
- social media marketing guide, an article by SEOmoz
