Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
After last year’s Panda updates and this year’s annoying Penguin update; SEO has been more than scary.
In fact, it’s been terrifying! Most SEOs have either quit or remained stagnant waiting for the “dust to settle.” The dust has settled as much as it ever will, and now is the time to claim back your old rankings if not gain new ones.
Ranking in the search engines today isn’t so much a question of “how can I get the most backlinks,” but a question of “how can I be the most popular.”
Popularity is what’s going to generate you the most traffic and rankings.
Before Google started tightening up the screws, we could literally throw up a 3-page site and build a few thousand low-quality links to it. Then just days later we’d be dominating. Unfortunately, those days are long gone and it’s no longer as simple to rank well.
Google wants to move away from its traditional way of ranking websites. Contextual backlinks are too easily manipulated. As we’ve seen this year; Google wants to become more social. First, they launched their Google Plus One buttons.
Similar to Facebook likes, G+1 buttons count as “likes” for your website, similar to backlinks. While they only account for a tiny percentage of Google’s search algorithm, it’s still one step away from traditional link building.
Next came their own social network… And of course, Google had been using Facebook likes, bookmarks, and Tweets (now x.com) as ranking indicators way before all of this. There are so many signs, all pointing towards a more social future and Google relying less on contextual backlinks. So here are 5 effective social link-building tactics:
In this guide
1. Social Syndication Network
First, you need a social syndication network. A social syndication network is a network of social sites/accounts that announce your new content. By new content, I mean new blog posts, articles, or pages on your blog. In order to use this tactic, you need to regularly publish new content.
Even if you’re not an avid blogger, this is still critical.
So, the first thing you need to do is set up accounts on the following websites:
- Twitter (now x.com)
- Google Plus 1
- Digg
- Myspace
- YouTube
Make sure you use your exact domain name as usernames. Once you’ve created the accounts, make sure you set up a Facebook page for your site and a Google Plus One business page. With your Facebook page, you can use a “vanity URL” to shorten your page URL. So instead of having “facebook.com/pages/252345/domain” it can be “facebook.com/domain.”
Very straightforward steps. After creating this little network of social accounts, you can use them to share or “announce” anything new you publish on your site. To do so automatically, you can use a service like ping.fm (no longer available; consider using Buffer or Hootsuite).
You just need to create a Ping.fm account, login, and “add new networks” to your account. Right after connecting all of the accounts, your syndication network is complete. From then on you need to log in to Ping.fm each time you publish new content and share it via the dashboard. To share new content simply write the content title and URL next to it, once done hit “ping.”
Ping.fm will instantly syndicate your URL onto all of the social profiles you connected. Ultimately this little tactic announces your new content, gives it social buzz, and a head start in the search engines.
2. Tweets
It’s no secret that Google uses Tweets (now x.com) as a metric to rank websites. The more tweets your pages get, the higher up they’ll rank… in theory. Honestly, I’ve never had much success in the form of ranking by getting lots of Tweets (now x.com). For some reason, it’s been pretty feeble, however, they’ve always sent hordes of traffic directly to my site.
Obviously, you’ll want to add “Tweet this” buttons to your site’s pages, but it’s a good idea to buy Tweets (now x.com). There are plenty of online services that sell Tweets (now x.com), the easiest place to find them is on Fiverr.com (checked as of July 2024).
3. Re-Tweets
Re-Tweets are vastly underrated. From personal experience, they’re 100 times more effective than normal Tweets (now x.com). They generate a rapid influx of visitors as well as long-term Google love. Re-Tweeting is when a Twitter user reposts (re-tweets) another user’s Tweet (now x.com).
You were never meant to do this alone
Reading this changes nothing. Doing it with people who show up changes everything. That is the whole difference between the people who transform and the people who keep starting over.
Start free →It’s one of the most fundamental social SEO strategies, but really the most effective. The idea is to get hundreds or thousands of users to re-Tweet (now x.com) your Tweet (now x.com) that includes a link to your website. In the process, you get hundreds or thousands of social links, as well as Google thinking you’re a freaking rockstar.
It’s difficult to get many natural re-Tweets (now x.com), so I just outsource them. You can find plenty of Fiverr gigs offering thousands of re-Tweets (now x.com) for $5 (checked as of July 2024)!
4. Facebook Likes
Probably the most obvious tactic of all, one that SEOs have been using since the inception of social signals. Google pays a lot of attention to your site’s Facebook activity.
The more people talking about your site on Facebook, the more popular Google assumes your site is. Order Facebook likes if you need to. Otherwise, install a Facebook like box on your site or blog.
Include a short call to action telling your readers/visitors to like you on Facebook. It really does work.
5. Google Plus Ones (deprecated)
Google Plus Ones are kind of a recent development in social signals. They’ve been proven to carry a lot of weight. Google supposedly invented them as a social signal. Just like every other social signal, the more you have, the more popular your site seems. Again, you can buy Plus Ones from Fiverr or any other online service.
Remember, it’s all a popularity game.
Social signals are the latest development in link building.
If you’re worried about getting slapped by Google or SEO becoming unreliable; put an equal amount of effort into social signals and marketing your site on social networks. In my opinion, it’s the future of SEO: social signals.
In Prosperity,
David Wood
P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments, and questions below. Also opt-in to the email list on the right for more cool SEO tips, tricks, and secrets.
Comments (carried over from the previous site)
India Tenders, June 26 2012, 12:00
Such great 5 Social tips. I really happy to read about this tips. It is very useful tips for me……..
John Doe, June 27 2012, 14:30
Very informative post! Thanks for sharing these tactics. I’ve been struggling with my SEO recently, and this is just what I needed.
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Step one relies on Ping.fm, which the article itself flags as gone. So the syndication-network input is broken before you even reach step two — worth diagramming what actually still functions here: content in, distribution network (dead), signal out. Two of five tactics point at services that no longer exist.
$5 for ‘thousands’ of retweets on Fiverr — thousands meaning what, exactly? No range given, no time frame, no before-and-after number on actual rankings. ‘Google thinking you’re a rockstar’ isn’t a metric I can check.
Buy Facebook likes. Buy retweets. Buy Plus Ones. Every tactic here is ‘purchase the appearance of popularity and hope Google can’t tell the difference.’ Fine, maybe it worked in 2012. Google’s spent a decade specifically hunting for exactly this pattern since.
Marla, I think what’s being missed here is the date on this post. This was written in the window right after Penguin, back when buying engagement carried a completely different risk profile than it does now — Google hadn’t yet built the detection it has today for exactly this pattern, and plenty of sites genuinely did climb rankings buying retweets and Plus Ones in that specific year or two. I don’t think that makes it good advice to follow today, and I don’t think you’re wrong that it’s fragile. But read as a snapshot of what a specific tactic looked like in a specific window, rather than as instructions to run in the present tense, there’s something honestly useful in here about how quickly a working shortcut gets closed once enough people find it.
Marla’s dating this about right. We called it ‘buying social proof’ in 2010. Same shortcut, same eventual detector.
Marla’s right that buying the appearance of popularity is the whole strategy here, and it’s worse the smaller your market is. In a place like mine everyone knows everyone — a page with obviously bought likes and zero locals actually engaging gets spotted in about a day.
At sixty-one I read ‘set up accounts on seven different networks and post to all of them daily’ and mostly feel tired. I wonder whether the return justifies the hours for someone starting from zero on all seven at once, or whether one done properly beats seven done badly.
The strongest case for Arthur’s seven-platform approach, even now: reach compounds, and you don’t know in advance which network your particular audience actually lives on, so casting wide is the only way to find out cheaply. I’m not sure I believe it myself, but it’s the argument that would need answering before dismissing the whole list.
Google Plus Ones. There’s a sentence that aged badly.