An interesting debate took place on linkedin recently regarding what is a social expert, as part of the comments that I saw I discovered that someone was trying to classify who is actually more imporant, is it tech, is it SEO or is it Social Media?
What was suprising is the percieved value of Social Media could be actually higher then someone doing SEO or Software Development or a “techie” as someone calls it. The percieved value comes from people that own their own companies, and are not technically orientated that makes it a fair look at the perception.
I think the Software Development, SEO and Social Media world is changing.
In the early days of tech only the few understood how to “optimise a web page” for SEO, but SEO is now mostly built into technology, I know this because I have seen it from a tech point of view.
The old adage is that content is king and this is true. I believe that SEO has now been classed and evolved into Social Media.
SEO starts with content on a page and then what? then others must know about it, there are two ways that I see it (in a nutshell)
a) An employee has to hunt across relevant websites to post comments, blog posts, etc and this can take potentially ages
b) a social media person does some sort of campaign has a couple of thousand people that are
- interested in certain fields and is likely connected to simular people
- willing to retweet (create a new link)
I recently run a test to understand what is actually happening with a website I created called http://www.founderspeak.com and on this website I wanted to create sustained visitors so I tried 2 methods and here are the results:
1) commenting on like websites with approapriate comments in my target market on approapriate blogs
Lots of people looking at my website to moderate my comments, most comments accepted
2) create links via twitter
I had some strange spikes in traffic, not REAL visitors but other twitter traffic aggregators, but this actually created backlinks to my website, once i stopped sending links the traffic died off, but I had those permanent links
So what gave me the most value?
1) Software development and correct content are essential for long term results
2) Social Media, depending on number of followers, and content can get fast results that are likely short to medium term that could hopefully convert to long term links (depends on who is linking to it)
3) SEO offpage is needed to create and sustain long term results, which may take a while to get going
I have listed the above in the order I think they are important that would be developed around a companies business plan.
Note that the focus will not just repasted content from now on (according Googles war on Demand Media) where “content farms” are identified and re-ranked thus breaking all content farm money making solutions
What are content farms anyhow?
Most of them are software based crawling services that take original content and post it as their own, no original value being added, but takes up the hard work of the software developers, SEO and Social Media strategies without input needed