Ask The Web Developer

SEO Part 3: The Reckoning

This is our third post in our series about SEO. If you haven't seen them already, you should visit the first and second blogs. The first one is a high level overview and the second dives a bit deeper and deals with keywords, ALT Image text, etc.

In this post, we will look at backlinking and social media and how they affect your SEO.

Backlinking

The concept/definition is pretty simple: Backlinks are inbound links to your site. The more outside links you have pointing to your site, the better. That means that your site will rank higher based on importance.

Example: You and I each have a website dealing with and farms. I have 10 sites that link back to me in one way or another. However, you have 100 sites that link back to you. Because you have more sites that link back to you, the search engines will interpret this as your site is more popular or important than mine and therefore rank it higher than mine.

The inherent problem that I see with this is with content. If you really think about it, it's not hard (although time consuming) to start getting a bunch of links pointing back to your site. However, does the quality of your content warrant it? There are a number of techniques out there, one of which is building or taking advantage of a link farm. You don't want to do that. A link farm is a group of sites that all link back to each other. This is a form of spamming the search engine (spamdexing) and is considered all around bad.

There's also a concept called "linkbaiting". This is when there is some breaking news and you end up having a gazillion bloggers write about it. A good example of this was/is the iPhone 4 debacle between Apple, Gizmodo, and that dude that screwed up and left the phone at a bar. If you look back at my blog posts, you'll see I didn't touch the subject here. I wanted to stay true to the intent of this blog, even at the possible detriment of hits. The point of linkbaiting is that you're writing about a topic that is interesting to a large group of people in the hopes of getting them to visit your site and link back to you.

However, the search engines also consider the quality of the backlink. In short, it looks at both sites and determines if the site linking to you is relevant to what you're blogging about. In particular, what kind of authority level does that site have about that specific topic/genre? The more authoritative the site, the better the quality. So, in my example above, if I would've blogged about that iPhone 4 issue, I may have garnered a lot of visitors and possibly some backlinks. However, those links would have a low value because that topic overall doesn't have anything to do with this blog. Or consider the other side; I've now linked back to Gizmodo (above) for the sake of the exmaple. They'll get a backlink from me but it won't matter much due to the content of this site.

So, backlinking is necessary but the quality of that backlink trumps sheer numbers. So the Holy Grail would be to have a ton of backlinks from authoritative sites that share the same or similar content.

Social Networks

Social Networking... the bain of my existence. On one hand, I enjoy connecting with old friends via Facebook, on the other hand, it's a huge waste of my time. Here's a sad little story to entertain you for a minute before we get into the subject:

By nature, I'm a fairly introverted person. I enjoy my alone time and I don't particularly enjoy crowds (no, I'm not anti-social and no, I don't live in a shed in the Montana back country). So I don't generally go shopping. Anywhere - the mall, the grocery store... if I can, I'll get what I need online. It's generally cheaper and a more efficient use of my time, and I don't have to deal with large crowds of people. Anyway, our family had our kids and my wife and I decided to do some shoe shopping this weekend. When we were done, I couldn't help but think how weird it was shopping in person; having to deal with a sales rep and their inflated retail pricing. It occurred to me that the more we live on the web and the bulk of our interactions are via Facebook, MySpace, etc, the more our society fails. On one hand, it's great to have info at your fingertips, on the other, it's putting up fences interpersonally.

So to me, social networking is a bitter-sweet thing. As a business owner, I realize I need that component to help my business grow. On the other, I think it is the downfall of our society (okay, that might be a little over-dramatic). So, let's just look at the pluses and what it's intended to do.

Social networking focuses on building relationships between people/groups who share the same interests and/or activities. My LinkedIn profile connects me with other designers while my Facebook profile connects me with scattered friends. As a business model, it allows me to connect with more people at a relatively low cost (free). Better yet, it allows me to connect with people in different parts of the world. Otherwise, the alternative is the local phone book. While that is an important aspect to a business owner, it's limited to your region. Another great thing about social networking is that it provides a backlink to your site. Granted, it may not be a real quality backlink in some situations, but at least it's something.

There are a number of different directions one can take when discussing social networking. I wanted to focus primarily on the aspect of how it can build your customer base and that can help with your backlinks and overall visibility online.

I have to admit this, though; I have yet to garner a new customer as a result of any of my (albeit meager) attempts at social networking. Maybe it's because I just don't have all the time/motivation it requires. Or maybe it's just not as effective a tool as they say. Time will tell, I suppose.