Social Networking - Driven by Drivel - After You’ve Submitted Your Site - SEO For Dummies, 6th Edition (2016)

SEO For Dummies, 6th Edition (2016)

Part IV. After You’ve Submitted Your Site

Chapter 19. Even More Great Places to Get Links

In This Chapter

arrow Understanding social networking

arrow Avoiding the hype

arrow Reaping the SEO benefits of social networking

Is there a place for social networking in a book on SEO? Well, to some degree, yes. But I don’t go into great detail about social networking, because many of the benefits (when there are benefits) are not related to SEO. Social networking can be used in various ways to market a product or service, or an associated Web site, but that’s not all about SEO.

Just What Is Social Networking?

Before I go any further, I should answer a basic question: What is social networking?

A social-networking service is one that helps people communicate together and share information quickly. Consider for a moment a basic, informational Web site. Clients come to the site, read about the products or services being promoted by the site, perhaps take some kind of action — make a purchase, sign up for a newsletter, or whatever — and go away. The communication flow is all one-way.

Of course, you could add two-way communication to a Web site — a chat system that allows customers to chat online with customer-service staff, for instance. But it’s still fairly limited communication.

A social-networking service, though, provides multichannel communications. Members of the service’s “community” can communicate with any other member who wants to communicate. Facebook, the world’s largest social-networking service, claims to have almost a billion users each day, with 1.44 billion active user accounts. If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s most populous nation. Any of those 1.44 billion members can communicate with any other member, assuming the other member is interested in communicating.

Social networking is more than just “communicating,” though. Social network sites often encourage people to set up their own minisites or profiles, on which they can post information about themselves, such as photos and messages. They can search for and connect with other members with similar interests, or members they know out in the real world.

The social-networking landscape is large and amorphous. You can certainly argue that discussion groups are part of social networking, and there are many tens of thousands of discussion groups. Blogging is also often considered a part of social networking. But various other things often are bundled in with social networking systems, such as Skype and Whatsapp. However, I think of these more as communication tools, not as true social-networking systems. (I believe that they more correctly come under the heading of social media — communications tools for ordinary people that may be used in a “social network context.”)

I think one important characteristic of true social-networking sites is that they make publishing easy for people with no technical skills. All of a sudden, through the power of social networking, virtually anyone can be an online publisher, rather than merely a consumer of online information.

Social networking is a relatively new term; even most of today’s Facebook members probably didn’t know the term until relatively recently. (Facebook didn’t open to the public until September 2006.) But social networking is actually an old concept, going back to the late 1970s or early 1980s. Online services such as CompuServe might be thought of as proto-social-networking services, allowing one-to-one communication between members, group communications in forums, the sharing of digital materials (text documents, images, software), and so on. (As a sociological concept, the term social networking goes back to at least the early 1970s.)

Today, though, what are the really important social-networking sites? The four most important, in North America, are definitely Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+.

Twitter has around 300 million individual users tweeting (that is, for those of you who have been held hostage in a cave somewhere, sending short Twitter messages) around 500 million times a day. (Is Twitter really a social-networking service? Yes, because it allows multichannel communication. However, the majority of Twitter users never send a message; they use it to receive information, so for most users, it could be argued, it’s really more of a message-delivery service than a social network.)

Then there’s Google+. Launched in 2011, it’s a slick Facebook competitor that has suffered from Facebook burnout (who needs another social network when you’re already wasting too much time on the ones you have?!) but also benefited from the power of brand Google. Within six months, Google+ had grown to 90 million members, eventually reaching around half a billion users; still not much more than a third of Facebook’s membership. But from an SEO perspective, it’s not just numbers that count. Google+ can be, as you see later in this chapter, an important factor in SEO regardless of the size.

Many other social-networking services exist, of course. Here are a few of the biggies in North America:

· MySpace: Perhaps 50 million users, defying the odds and actually growing while most pundits said it would soon be dead; it used to be the world’s #1 social-networking site before a dramatic decline. Many teenagers use MySpace until they decide they’re too embarrassed to hang out with the kids and switch to Facebook.

· LinkedIn: A business-networking site (based on the “six degrees of separation” concept), with over 300 million users and growing.

· Pinterest: Over 70 million active members and growing rapidly among female users. Pinterest lets you organize and share beautiful things (primarily images) you find on the Web.

· Flickr: A photo-sharing network with almost 100 million users.

There are many, many social-networking sites, including “social-bookmarking” sites (such as Delicious and Stumbleupon), sites related to particular interests, sites designed to help people find old friends (Classmates.com, for instance), and so on.

Beware the Social-Networking Hype

Social networking, properly used, can most definitely be a very valuable marketing tool. Having said that, I want to warn you that there’s a lot of social-networking hype out there, and it’s easy to get swept up into social networking only to find you have wasted a lot of time and money.

First, consider that social networking will work better for some companies than others. For instance, take Twitter. This service can be a great way to communicate with people for some businesses. ShopAtHome.com has around 267,000 followers of its Twitter feed. This company provides shopping discounts, so a Twitter feed is a natural fit for it; people like deals! Groupon, a “deal of the day” service, has dozens of separate feeds, one for each city it works in; the GrouponChicago feed currently has over 50,000 followers.

But what about a company that provides air-conditioning installation service? How many people want to hear from it every day? I’m not saying that it’s not possible for such a company to benefit from a Twitter feed, but I am saying that the chance it will benefit from a Twitter account is much lower (okay, almost nil).

Also, social-networking campaigns need to be well thought out and well managed. Plenty of companies are happy to take your money for setting up some kind of generic, “me, too” social-networking system that hasn’t a hope in Hades of working.

Here’s an example. Way back when — say, eight or ten years ago — I would hear from new clients who said things like, “My friend Joe [my nephew/the last SEO firm I worked with/and so on] told me that if you want to do business online, you must have a MySpace account.” I even heard this from real estate agents. (My answer? “Oh, are you selling houses to 13-year-olds?”) It was complete nonsense, of course, but the hype was strong, too powerful for many businesses to resist, and led to millions of dollars of waste.

So before you let someone talk you into a social-networking campaign, make sure you understand exactly how it would work. Why will people join your group or subscribe to your Twitter feed? What do you expect them to do? How will you communicate with them? How will all of this benefit you?

Before anyone accuses me of being “against” social networking, let me just reiterate. Social networking can work well, at least for the right companies that have all their ducks in a row. However, I’m pretty certain that most dollars spent on social networking are wasted.

The Drivel Factor

If you don’t know this already, you need to learn quickly. Most — the vast majority — of social networking is drivel. (Drivel: senseless talk; nonsense; saliva, drool; to talk nonsense; to talk senselessly.)

Do I have to prove this, or can you take it as a given? Okay, here’s an example. Pear Analytics did a study of randomly selected public Twitter messages and found that

· 40.6 percent were “pointless babble.”

· 37.6 percent were “conversational messages.”

· 8.7 percent were “pass along” messages, those useful enough to have been forwarded by another Twitter user.

· 3.6 percent were information about news from the mainstream media.

· 5.9 percent were company self-promotion.

· 3.9 percent were spam.

What is “pointless babble”? You know the type of message: I want to eat cereal, but I’m out of milk!!! or Where has that postman got to?! — the sort of thing that burns up perfectly good electrons for no good reason.

Taken together, then, the pointless babble, conversational messages, and spam comes to around 82 percent of all messages.

The challenge for the marketer is to somehow cut through the drivel and find the value.

The SEO Benefits of Social Networking

Because this is a book on SEO, I want to get back to that subject: How can social networking help your SEO efforts? There are essentially four ways:

· Link benefit: Links from social-networking sites can, in some cases, help boost your pages in the search engines.

· Search engine real estate: As the search engines index some social-networking pages (and Tweets), being in social-networking sites gives you another online location, another possibility for being found by the search engines.

· Promotional benefit: The whole point of a social networking campaign is to promote your site or business; doing so puts it in front of people and builds awareness. The more aware people are of your site, the more links you’re going to get.

· The social networking sites are search engines: What’s a search engine? A site where people search. And people search on social-networking sites.

Getting links through social-networking sites

You find out about the value of links in Chapters 16 through 18. Well, Google has indexed over 5 billion Facebook pages, and many of those pages contain links to the page owners’ Web sites.

Here’s the problem, though. These links are nofollow links (see Chapter 16), so, in theory at least, they have no link value. Twitter also uses nofollow links, as does MySpace and many other social-networking sites.

So, do those links have any value? In Chapter 16, I told you no. In this chapter, I’m suggesting a theory. I don’t know whether this is true, but … what if the search engines do sometimes read nofollow links? After all, what is the point of nofollow links? The original purpose was to stop people from spamming blog comments by telling the search engines not to follow the links and thus removing an incentive for blog comments. But the purpose of nofollow was not really to stop search engines indexing links — that was just a mechanism to discourage spam.

Now, imagine that you are a search engine programmer. You want as much information as you can get to help you rank pages. Aren’t all those links on social-networking sites useful? After all, Google was based on the concept of examining links to learn about referenced sites. In the pre-social-networking days, Google recruited a relatively small number of site owners to tell them which sites were important.

Now, with the barriers to entry being much, much lower for social networking and social bookmarking — it’s much easier to set up a Facebook, or MySpace, or Digg account than to build a Web site — Google has a much larger army of site reviewers to help it figure out how to rank Web sites. There are quite simply many more social-networking accounts than there are conventional Web sites.

So you, the search engine programmer, know that all this great information is out there to … but wait! They are nofollow links! Do you decide not to use the links?

To make nofollow links accomplish their original purpose, search engines don’t have to ignore the links; it’s good enough if people think the search engines ignore the links. But perhaps they don’t. Perhaps they do read those links to extract this vast amount of useful information.

That’s just a theory; again, I don’t know whether it’s true. I can tell you that under the commonly accepted nofollow theory, many social-networking links have no SEO value. On the other hand, if my unproven theory is correct, these links do have SEO value. (And remember, links have value in their own right; sometimes people click them!)

technicalstuff You can find conflicting information on this issue if you care to search and see what the search engines say. Certainly, both search engines have said in the past that they do use social-networking data. For example, Bing has stated that “We do look at the social authority of a user. We look at how many people you follow, how many follow you, and this can add a little weight to a listing in regular search results,” and Google has said that “we do use it as a signal. It is used as a signal in our organic and news rankings.” As for the specific question of “do you ignore nofollow links or not,” note that, in the early days, the social networks did not use nofollow links. If the search engines found those links useful in the early days, they might not have simply stopped using them for ranking just because the networks started nofollowing them.

tip My personal belief? Social networks can help your search engine ranking. How do you generate links from social-networking sites? By engaging your community. If you have a strong social-networking community, you can use various techniques to encourage members to create links to your Web sites, on their own Web sites, their blogs, their social-networking profiles, and so on.

Grabbing search engine real estate

Another way that social networking can help you — perhaps — is to grab real estate in the search results — that is, when someone searches for your keywords, your site comes up in the search results and some of your social-networking profiles come up in the results, or the profiles of others who are linking to you come up in the results.

In practice, grabbing real estate is harder than it seems, because social-networking pages themselves are not given much weight by the search engines. How do I know that? Because they don’t often come up in the search results.

You can find significant exceptions, though. For instance, search for the name of a band or musician, and you may see their Facebook page appear in the results. When searching for individual’s names, LinkedIn.com pages often come up pretty high in the results.

Still, if you want to grab real estate through social networking, the way to do it is to create various social-networking accounts for your site or business, and then ensure they have lots of links pointing to them, containing the correct keywords, of course (see Chapters 16 to 18).

Promotional Benefit

As I mention elsewhere, the best links are real links. To paraphrase Matt Cutts again, what you need is links in “editorial [content] freely given where someone is recommending something and talking about it in a blog post” or some other form of Web site.

Thus, as I mention elsewhere (Chapter 18), SEO linking is moving toward a PR model: You promote your site, business, or product, and people write about you — and link to you — because there’s a real story to be told.

Social networking can be a huge part of a PR campaign, a way to reach the masses, and to encourage the masses to talk about you. It’s a way to get people to mention you in their blogs, to help journalists to discover you and write about you in magazine, news, and newsletter sites, and so on. So social networking can be a hugely important tool for many businesses to promote themselves and, almost coincidentally, end up with links that promote their Web sites.

The social-networking sites are search engines

The major social networking sites are also major search engines, with billions of searches a month; in fact, Facebook alone gets more searches each month than Ask.com.

So, social-networking sites are search engines. Now, it’s true that many of these searches are for people, but many will be for interests and products, too. So another SEO reason for a social-networking strategy is that you have a chance of coming up in the many social-networking site searches.

The Google+ Factor

Google+ is Google’s social-networking site. After failing with Orkut (most Americans have never even heard of Orkut), Google started over and tried again. For a while, Google seemed to be really getting somewhere, with 90 million members in the first few months, but it was never able to beat Facebook at its own game. It’s still one of the world’s most important social networks, though.

One reason for its success — and one reason why it’s so important to SEO — is that Google is working to integrate Google+ pages into the search results themselves. In fact, Google+ is being integrated into the entire Googlesphere; one example is that Google integrated businesses’ Google+ pages into the search results. (Any “local” business really must have a Google+ page. See Chapter 12.)

Social Networking — A Book in Itself

Social-networking marketing is a big and complicated subject that deserves a book of its own. I outline in general terms how social networking can be used to help your site from an SEO perspective, but social networking is a form of marketing by itself, independent of any SEO benefits you may derive from it. So I leave it there and move on, in Chapter 20, to a related subject: using video for SEO purposes.

However, to find out more about using social networking for your business, see Social Media Marketing For Dummies, 3rd Edition, by Shiv Singh and Stephanie Diamond (published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.) and The Digital Handshake: Seven Proven Strategies to Grow Your Business Using Social Media, by Paul Chaney (also published by Wiley).