Promote Social Media For Long Term SEO Gain

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Social media is becoming used as both a marketing and link building option by many SEO proponents. There are many different types of social media outlets ranging from forums through social bookmarking and social interaction sites like Facebook and Myspace.

It often appears that individuals who use these sites do so to get incoming links and traffic coming into their pages, but not going back out again. From an SEO perspective I can understand the thinking – if there is any. Sometimes it is done without giving any thought to reversing the process.

Many will ask, “why would you link back to a social site?” Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t. But there are times when your promotion of a social site may ultimately benefit your own SEO agenda.

Take a forum. Most forums are specialized, which means the links coming back could be considered quality. The downside of many forums that specialize is that they don’t receive masses of traffic themselves. If you promote these forums you can help to build their numbers and this growth could be exponential; that is, for every visitor you introduce the long benefit may be 5 or 10 new members as they introduce new members themselves.

How does this help your long term SEO? In simple terms, the more members in a forum, the more exposure you will receive. Consider a forum with 50 members and 10%, at various times, link back to your site – that’s five links. Increase that number to 250 members and you receive – twenty-five relevant links.

It may seem I am mocking these links, I am not. It is the long term that is important. If each site that has linked to your pages receives 200 visitors per day – that is a total of 1000 from five links – compare that to 5000 from twenty-five links. If 10% of those visitors click through to your pages, that is a 100 compared to 500. We could carry this on with 10% of those visitors linking, and so on. You can see the cumulative effect.

This has all been generated simply by promoting that forum and increasing the number of members. If you look at some of the larger SEO related forums that are around today, particularly those that have been around for five plus years, members of these forums who have remained active now boast backlinks into the tens of thousands. A majority of those backlinks would have had their origins in the forums and you can guarantee that in the early days they were keen to promote them. Many of these long term forum members are still actively engaged in promoting the forum and trying to attract new members.

Forums are just one example. Social bookmarking has the potential to deliver similar results in a shorter period of time. By simply promoting a social site, your own long term SEO goals may be given a sizeable boost.