On Wednesday, July 15, 2009, I attended one of WebMarketing123.com’s free webinars, called “Increase Sales Through Social Media Optimization.” I highly recommend you attend these wonderful webinars. They teach a lot about search engine optimization, paid-search campaigns and other important ecommerce topics that can help your bottom line.
At this particular webinar, the speakers talked a lot about optimizing websites to get the best results on search engines. That’s a topic I also covered in my seven-part SEO series a while back. The part that really caught my interest was when they talked about social media and its relation to SEO.
The speakers said Facebook and Twitter are not useful at all for gaining first-page ranking on search engines, like Google or Bing. Any links posted on these two websites have a “nofollow” tag in their HTML code, telling search engines to disregard them in their algorithms. The good news is links on other social networks, such as Digg, LinkedIn, Technorati and Propeller, actually do count toward SEO for your website.
I also took away from the webinar the fact that Facebook and Twitter are great for generating qualified leads. You can tweet about company offers or post links to landing pages on your Facebook wall to invite interested customers to your site. They can definitely help increase traffic to your website, though not through the search engines.
I think the webinar speakers got one thing wrong, though. They said Facebook and Twitter offer absolutely no help with SEO, but I think that’s only partly true. Yes, they don’t offer direct SEO because the links on them don’t attract search engines’ attention. But one of the reasons you post a link on these sites is to get other social-media users to find it and post a link to it on their own blog or website. And that does help with SEO because inbound links are powerful.
I think Twitter and Facebook are useful SEO tools, even though they might not seem so at first glance. I’ve been talking a lot about Twitter and Facebook in the last week. My last eHarbor blog entry was called “Is Twitter overhyped?” but now I’m starting to realize Twitter is more helpful than I previously thought. Both Twitter and Facebook are fascinating tools and they can be useful when incorporated into an overall marketing strategy that includes SEO and other online strategies.
The photo of the free Google search coupon is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of Bramus.
Tags: Bing, facebook, google, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Media, twitter, webinar
You are on the mark with your comments about the value of Twitter and Facebook to SEO. Links on other sites and in other’s blogs is a key aspect of both of those services. If you are creating original content, then those two services are essential tools for generating awareness, comments, links and stories where you may be quoted as an expert. In other words, your social media strategy all works together through your blog, tweets, facebook and other postings. Once you have a critical mass of followers and credibility, the likelihood of inbound links increases dramatically.
Dear Scott,
Thank you very much for your comment. Twitter and Facebook can bring a whole new element to SEO, and make it much easier for like-minded people to find a person’s or company’s content. Wonderful insights. Thanks again for taking the time to share them. Have a great day!
Sincerely,
Robert Lockard