A new trend in link building is to use social media to help you build link popularity to your website. As link building continues to be the hardest part of SEO people will always be looking for new ways to generate more links.
One of the new strategies is something that has been name SEO link wheels.
A link wheel works like this:
You write 10 articles all related to the keyword you are targeting in your link building.
You submit those 10 articles to 10 different article directories (ie ezinearticles.com, isnare.com etc).
In each article you place two links; One link to your site using your keyword, and the other link would link to one of the other 9 articles you have submitted to the other article directories.
Thus each article is connected to your site and to the other articles written that also link to your site and that is why they call it a wheel as you can clearly see from my awesome graphic below: :-)
Instead of just submitting to article directories you can also mix things up by doing some blog posts with the links embedded as well as a couple of youtube videos that also link to your site and to another one of the articles or blog posts.
SEO link wheel companies swear by this approach. I tested this method out on a small scale and had a little success with it. If it is something you feel like you want to try I would recommend that you only target one keyword and choose a keyword you have not been able to rank for. That way you can see whether or not the thing is working or not.
Yesterday as I pulled up to my driveway after a long hard days work (wink, wink) I noticed my 7 year old son Boston in the front sitting at a small table with a pitcher of lemonade. It took me a minute before I realized that he had a lemonade stand set up.
This really took me by surprise as I would have expected him to be too scared to try something like that on his own. I had noticed that over the last couple of weeks he had been making a lot of lemonade and I was wondering why he was making so much. Now I realize that what he really was doing was perfecting his product.
So I got out of my truck and just kind of stood there and watched as one kid after another came up to his stand and paid $.25 for a cup of lemonade. As one kid would buy some other neighborhood kids would see the goings on and come over and ask if my son was selling lemonade. They would then run home and get money and come buy a glass for themselves.
I stood and watched perplexed as these kids all wanted to be part of this event of buying their own glass of lemonade. It made me realize a selling principle that is true in both 7 year olds and adults alike. People want to be a part of the thing that everyone else is a part of. That is why social media works so well. That is why our Make Money Posting Links On Google Scam post has over 30 comments on it.
People love to be a part of something big. For my son and the neighborhood kids the “big” thing was buying lemonade at the stand. This is why having a lot of testimonials on your sales page works so well. It creates the sense of “everybody is doing it and you should too”.
So now the goal for you is to harness this knowledge and use it to sell to your visitors. Create an atmosphere of “this is the happening place to be”. Add a forum or open up blog comments on your blog, collect more testimonials…do something to create your own lemonade stand buzz.
Good luck and get social.
I’m sure you are already ready to post some nasty comments on this blog about how big of an idiot I am. Before you do that, please hear me out.
I have recently come across two prominent (Shoemoney, The Simple Dollar) bloggers in the blogosphere that both had written posts about how SEO doesn’t really matter and how SEO has no future. I understand that they both wrote these posts to generate buzz but the message they are sending is very misleading. Both of these guys are very smart and know a ton about blogging and internet marketing in general. They also share the same trait in that neither of them has a strong background in SEO and they may not truly understand the big picture.
The post at the simple dollar is actually a good post and I agree with some of what he is saying, what I don’t agree with is the fact that he starts out by saying it doesn’t matter. His main point was that if you write great content then the keywords will be in place and the page is already optimized. Writing great content is an excellent suggestion but if you really understand SEO, you know that you have to research and choose keywords people actually search for and write content to include those words and try to keep a good balance of key phrase density. You need to write good titles and descriptions targeting those key phrases as well.
My background is in SEO and so I know how valuable it is. I don’t have a ton of experience in social media, so I could easily write a post about how social media has no future because the bulk of my traffic comes from SEO, not social media. I make alot of money online taking advantage of the SEO knowledge that I have. I could stand up and shout SEO IS THE FUTURE, NOT SOCIAL MEDIA and try to make my point. But just because I am proficient in SEO doesn’t have anything to do with the future or effectiveness of social media.
The truth of the matter is that they both are very valuable internet marketing tactics. They are both legitimate ways to build traffic and you can make a lot of money online implementing one or both of the techniques.
So SEO does have a future and it does matter, social media however is dead.
