Saturday, December 18, 2010

Reviews and blog comments good for SEO

The end result of search engine optimization, or SEO, is of course to climb up the search engine rankings. The closer you are to the number one spot on the search results for any given keyword, the more traffic you will see on your site. This has obvious benefits, and makes it clear why SEO is a must for any business to be successful online. But SEO often works in mysterious ways. As an example, if somebody writes a negative review on you, this can actually be good for SEO. This, obviously applies for Spanish SEO as well as English SEO.

To understand why this is the case, you need to understand how the search engines operate. Google does not release its algorithm to the public, so nobody knows exactly how it works. Even so, experts throughout the industry have noticed indisputable trends. The most important factor in search engine rankings is the backlink. A backlink is a link that another site points to your site. Google considers backlinks to be an indicator of the authority of a site. The more sites linking to your site, the higher your site will climb in the search engines.

There is more to the process than that, of course. If the link comes from a site that itself has a great deal of links pointing toward it, that link has more influence. If the link comes from a site that has been identified as selling links, the link may actually have a negative impact. In general, however, if a link points toward your site, this is a good thing.

Blog commenting in the eyes of Google

When it comes to reviews and blog comments, this means that a link from a comment or a review will be good for your search engine rankings, even if the tone of the comment is negative. As long as the link points toward your site, it means that you will rate closer to the top of the search engine listings.

Some sites add a "nofollow" tag to any link posted on the site in an effort to reduce spam. This tag tells the search engines not to use the link for search engine rankings. In reality, it is up to the search engines whether or not to pay attention to the nofollow tag, and there is a possibility that nofollow tags actually play a part in the search engine rankings. Inevitably, they would receive a lower weight than "dofollow" links, but they may still play a part, although some say that it may do more harm than good when it comes to Google.

What has been your experience with blog commenting? Do you think that in the eyes of Google, blog commenting is bane?

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Saturday, December 4, 2010

Strong social media today good SEO tomorrow

Search engine optimization is a very important tactic when it comes to driving traffic to your site. It is so important that many people overlook the fact that it is not everything. As a matter of fact, if you rely too heavily on obtaining links in order to promote your site, you could end up setting yourself up for trouble in the future. Social media is becoming more and more important when it comes to receiving traffic. People are more likely to trust a site if it is recommended to them through a social network than if they find it through an internet search. In short, the internet is becoming less of a directory and more of a community. Entrepreneurs who fail to realize this could find themselves falling behind.

A website needs to be appealing not only to a search engine algorithm, but to an actual visitor. Even if search engine optimization continues to be the most important factor in driving traffic to a website, all of the effort will be for nothing if most of the visitors do not find the content to be appealing to them. In the present day, a Facebook account might seem more like an afterthought than a central part of internet marketing. This very well could change in the near future. It might not even be Facebook itself, but there is a good chance that some kind of social networking system will play a major part in the success or failure of online business not too long from now.

Social media removes a layer of abstraction

Social media and social networking remove a layer of abstraction from the process of finding information on the internet. A customer looking for a specific product is more likely to trust the judgment of other people than the judgment of a machine. The reason that Google uses backlinks as a measure of the credibility of a site is the fact that when a person links to a site, it often indicates that they like it, or that they feel it is in some way important. Social networking is a more direct way for people to indicate that they like something, and even allows them to say that they dislike it. As social networking becomes more important, these rankings will play a major part in the long term reputation of a site.

A strong social media campaign today could equal good SEO tomorrow

Social media will only become more important in the future. It has always been the intention of the internet to serve as a network. The social network is an integral part of this. People trust the judgment of others more than they trust the judgment of an algorithm. There is a good possibility that search engine rankings themselves will be heavily influenced by social media. Google and Bing know that indications of whether or not people like a site are important. If they want to provide internet searchers with search engine results that they will be pleased with, they will continue to place more and more importance on social media. In the end, social media today could equal SEO in the future.

So, what are your thoughts? Post a comment (good or bad) and if you liked it, please tweet or email about it!

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