Basic SEO Stuff That Can’t Be Ignored

I read this last Friday:

“In a new study on factors that affect search engine rankings of Web pages, marketing analytics company Covario reported that the number of inbound links from other Web sites is the single most important factor in a page showing up prominently in search results.”

Well, duh. Internet marketers have known this for years. Does this mean that we’re suddenly going to be deluged again with link farms and link exchange requests? Perhaps, but that’s not at all the point of the results of this study.

The importance of “back links” or “inbound links” for search engine optimization isn’t new. Somehow, though, it’s gotten lost in the flurry of activity over social networking. Social media has truly reshaped the search engine optimization landscape… but not by removing the importance of inbound links to your web site.

How Social Media Has Changed SEO

You have to look at SEO from the perspective of the search engines. If they provide the searcher with relevant listings, then the searcher will continue to use their search engine (and thereby click on ads, which generate revenue for the search engine company).

How do they know if a web page or web site is relevant to a search?  They use “spiders” (little programs) to “crawl” the web pages. They do their best to figure out what the web page is “about.” That’s where on-site search engine optimization comes in.

Then, they see if anyone else is talking about or referring to that web site. In times past, they just counted the number of links. Now, however, they look at the relative importance of the source of a link AND how the link to your web site is displayed.

In the past year or so, it tests indicate that the search engines are giving more credence to inbound links that come from social media sites and research sites, rather than from other web sites or blogs.

In Covario’s study, they found that external inbound links from educational (.edu) sites, the Delicious social bookmarking site, government (.gov) sites, the blog indexer Technorati.com and Wikipedia, in that order, as returning particularly high page rankings.

I suspect that in the coming months, we’ll see other social media sites (Digg, Social Median, etc.) start to play a much larger role in search engine rankings as well.

What These SEO Changes Mean For You

A few years ago the catch phrase for internet marketers was “Content is King.”  They said this partly because they were all selling PLR (Public Label Rights) articles or various programs to help you distribute your articles to article directories. The phrase was also true. The more content you created and syndicated to article directories and blogs, the higher your web site ranked for your selected search phrases.

Content is still king, but in a different way. The same folks still have their PLR programs, and many of them are still posting variations of their articles to humongous networks of blogs. These are members-only networks where the goal is to create massive numbers of blogs onto which you can share blog posts. It’s made to appear “natural” to the search engines. Obviously, it still works.

However… if you want to get ahead of the search engine optimization curve, you’ll turn your sights toward creating more inbound links from social media sites. Google is “onto” the blog network concept, and I suspect that their days are numbered.

Google doesn’t want to know that your web site (blog) is linked to from thousands of other blogs whose sole purpose is to sell affiliate products.

They want to know that others believe your web site contains value to the reader (and it should). They can no longer “know” this because a bunch of meaningless blogs point to you. They’ll know it because your blog article is “Clipped”, “Dugg” or “Bookmarked” by other users of social media and social networking sites.

The Bottom Line

By all means Twitter away. Get your Facebook fan page up and running. But if you want to get and stay at the top of the search engine listings, create valuable content. Then, find ways to get your valuable content talked about on the social media web sites. In the long run, most of your free web traffic will continue to come from the search engines.

Do what’s going to work tomorrow instead of what worked yesterday.

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