There are two reasons you provide links from your social media efforts:
- To generate significant targeted traffic to your site.
- To improve your search engine ranking by improving your link popularity as well as your link relevancy score by having your most important keyword phrases as anchor text in the link or in the text around the link pointing to your Web site.
The objective of generating traffic from the social media links is an easy one to accomplish. The traffic from your social media links will have a positive impact on your search engine optimization (SEO) because more traffic helps your SEO score.
The search engine impact of the links from the social media venue are a source of major discussion and subject to change as the search engines monitor the impact of links from social bookmarking, social voting, and social news sites as well as spamming from social media in an effort to impact the search engine ranking. Some of the social sites are having a major influence on page one ranking, sometimes providing less relevant sites. We all know that the search engines don’t like any kind of manipulation, and when they determine specific techniques used just to improve search engine ranking they reduce the weighting of that element in their formula, remove it from their formula, or make it a negative element in their formula.
As things evolve in this area I will be writing about it in my newsletter, so make sure you sign up for the newsletter or review the archive for relevant coverage.
At the time of the writing of this book, the links that are indexed and provided in the search engine results by the major search engines include:
- Facebook profile with very little information provided
- Facebook page
- Facebook groups
- LinkedIn profile—a subset of the profile is indexed
- LinkedIn job postings
- LinkedIn answers
- YouTube videos
- YouTube channel
- YouTube groups
- MySpace profile
- MySpace groups
- MySpace forums
- MySpace events
- MySpace blogs
- Flickr profile
- Flickr photos/videos
- Flickr groups
- Flickr applications
- Digg
- Delicious
- StumbleUpon.