Previously we highlighted a list of 67 different social networking sites, and today I want to examine how social media strategy can help your website and online presence.
There is an ongoing presumption among many internet marketers that linking out to websites can cause you to lose page rank, or that it sends a signal to the search engines that other sites might be more relevant for a specific keyword, harming one’s online search engine results. The truth is somewhat more convoluted. Remember, every search engine is designed to provide the most relevant data to its user, and every search engine is rapidly changing to cope with the overall surge of information being added to the internet every day.
Because of this, the algorithms (which are kept secret) also change. Signals that once influenced search decisions heavily have become less relevant, and over the last few years a couple of trends have emerged. To my mind, the most important rule of thumb is to present unique, relevant content consistently while crediting those other sites which provide interesting insights or commentary on your topic.
A corollary to this rule of thumb is that any activity which seems overly manipulative to a search engine, even if it works, will eventually become irrelevant. Before I explain specifically why social media has become such an important factor in future-compatibility for search engine optimization, I want to highlight an example of this irrelevancy which I’ve anticipated for the last year or so, the ‘NoFollow’ tag.
If you have access to the Firefox browser on your computer, I highly recommend trying out the SearchStatus add-on and setting it to highlight all nofollow links on a page. 
Here you can see a picture of this, simply right-click on the SearchStatus bar and then enable this feature. Now take a look at Twitter, or Wikipedia – you’ll notice that a great many of the links are now highlighted as being ‘NoFollow’ tags.
Soon after the tag was introduced, it began to be used in ways that actually contradicted the original intent behind creating the tag in the first place. Some used it as a way to ’sculpt pagerank’ believing that by encouraging search engines like google and yahoo to only index in certain ways, they could bring different content to the forefront of a search result. And it worked, for several years, however search engines aren’t concerned with what you as a webmaster or web site owner believes is most relevant, only what their user base believes is most relevant.
NoFollow tag abuse continued in other ways as well, with sites accruing mass amounts of user-generated content yet ‘nofollowing’ the links the users themselves added to the sites, effectively tricking their user base into a kind of intellectual slave labor. A great many social bookmarking sites are somewhat guilty of this, although many will argue that the vast amount of spammers manipulating social bookmarking made this a necessity on their part.
More recently, Google (who initiated the ‘NoFollow’ tag in the first place) revealed that they now place much less relevance on the tag than they have in the past. This is likely in part to their re-evaluation of the concept of PageRank, and signals a shift back toward the search engine itself being the prime determiner of content relevance. As a result, we can expect to see other search engines follow suit, eventually leaving behind a huge swath of irrelevant nofollow tags scattered across countless ‘optimized’ web pages.
When I first understood the ‘NoFollow’ concept I knew this trend would eventually manifest, for one very simple reason – most people who blog, or write online, or create their own web sites, had no idea what a ‘NoFollow’ tag was and were unlikely to use it in a coherent fashion, while those few who did understand the tag abused it to further their own search engine manipulation efforts. Just like the practice of keyword stuffing in the nineties, the NoFollow tag shall eventually become a relic of an ever-changing industry (for more, see 13 Reasons why No-Follow Tags Suck at SearchEngineJournal).
This brings us to today, and the reason for a forward-thinking strategy around social media.
Google Labs is already live with its audio indexing, and here you can see that in action – similar services are available through Google Voice already, and it will not be long before Goolge implements this fully, blending their search results with content from audio, video, and even OCR applied to images. Relying simply on text to power your search engine results will become as much of an outdated idea as the NoFollow tag.
Savvy marketers are already talking about 2010 being the year of Video, in much the same way that 2009 was the year of Twitter. Understanding that the media you add to sites today can become the foundations for your website’s traffic tomorrow places you in a much better position for long-term growth. Do not rely on what has worked as a measure of where to invest your energy online, instead look to what is being developed and use that as a guide.
Here’s some related blogs around the net that also deal with this topic if you’d like to learn more:
- Imagine Your Reality , Archive » Social media strategy for my … – Social Media strategy for my website and presence. Posted November 3rd, 2009 by admin and filed in Business reputation, Social Media, marketing. Tags: Blog software, Content management systems, social media presence, social media …
- Stop Behaving Badly on Social Media! | Search Engine Journal – I’ma noise musician. For those of you not familiar with the genre, that means my band, Grasshopper , caters to a very small audience who likes to.
- Social Media & Election Day – So I checked to see if either of you had any sort of social media presence. The answer: not really. As far as I can tell, Mayor Gray has no presence whatsoever on either Facebook or Twitter. As for you, Charlie Smithgall, …
- Increase Your Company’s SEO and Website Traffic with Pro features … – His immediate marketing goals were to: create a social media presence, increase search engine optimization (SEO), increase brand awareness, and drive additional traffic to the website. Steve decided to work with Widgetbox to implement a …
And as always, if you’d like to contact us to learn more about how we can develop an integrated approach for your web presence, feel free to use the contact form below:
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by sloppyunruh.com and Philip K Nixon, The Art of Memetics. The Art of Memetics said: Is the 'NoFollow' tag dead? http://is.gd/4N0jf What are your thoughts? #seo #onlinesocialoptimization #socialmedia [...]