Today a colleague and I looked into link popularity and how to increase it for your website. You can find the full SEO Blog here but a summary is below:

As we all know building links is still a big deal in the SEO industry. Websites such as Twitter and Facebook can improve your online presence and it can be more interesting using social media channels to build links. The problem is that it can take a lot of time and may not suit everyone.

Another way of getting people to link to you is to have quality content on your website. A quick breakdown of doing this is below:

• Make Top 10 Lists (can be different, but you get the idea)
• Videos
• Images
• Interviews
• Free Downloads
• Studies/Reports
• Tutorials

Some important things to consider for this strategy are;

• Is your market more likely to link to content that’s humorous or informative – find the most relevant subject for your audience.
• Is your site SEO friendly and also user friendly? Will people be able to link back to your URLs easily or are your URLs really long with query strings?
• If you provide good quality content for the audience and visitors to your site, backlinks will naturally follow, so don’t obsess over how to get the most links from every post or article.

Recently, two of my colleagues and I set about looking into the ways in which social media and SEO can exist together, the benefits of each and which is more important to your website.

The blog discussed whether search engine optimisation and social media optimisation work well together, by delving into both areas on a general level and explaining how to use them to your advantage, concluding with our final opinions on the matter.

We concluded that SEO techniques are employed to help sites rank highly in the search engine results pages of Google, Bing and Yahoo while SMO is used to raise brand awareness, create a buzz and get consumers talking about you. The main aim of both these techniques is to effectively make you and/or the site better known and more popular, which will result in more traffic and sales or whatever you aim your goal to be.

In our opinion, SMO and SEO can exist perfectly together. They both have positives and negatives but together they can provide a tool that if used correctly, can make your online presence develop hugely.

While SMO will continue to grow over the years and SEO continues to shift and change, the main focus will be on your users/customers and to build relationships and trust with them.

To read the rest of the post in more detail go here – SEO Blog

Manual link building is a very good but very tedious method of finding links to your website. The advantage over buying links in bulk is that you know exactly what you are getting, where the links are from and you can ensure the links are relevant to your industry or website subject matter.

In my job link building is a major part of my day to day life, it’s something that takes up maybe an hour of my day, whether for clients’ websites or the company’s site itself. Our SEO Blog is often linked to naturally, via Twitter retweets or people linking to us through choice. It is a great way of getting exposure.

Manual link building includes directory submissions, blog comments, article submissions, paid links and forum posts. There are other ways too – press releases and social media implementation such as Twitter and Facebook, keeping a regularly updated blog can benefit your website no end. If you keep your blogs interesting, give them the right exposure on platforms like Facebook, Twitter and relevant article sites you will achieve brand exposure as well as increased traffic.

In my opinion there is no substitute for manual link building. Yes, it can be tedious, but if you get it right you are well on your way to having a succesful online presence.

1. Use Your Blog to Set the Stage

A blog is the basis and foundation for getting your message or viewpoint across to the world. Using the blog as a central hub of information provides a web presence that you can use to interact with your existing customers and potential customers. Blogs are also a lot cheaper than having a full website built for you, and they can be pretty customisable. The content of your blog is where you can demonstrate your knowledge and expertise and provide useful information to your peers.

2. Use Facebook Strategically

Using Facebook shouldn’t be a question of if it should be used, it should always be used. Facebook has half a billion users and for a business it is essential to create a Facebook page for your information and services. In terms of visibility it is essential because the content and resources that you post get indexed by search engines. Making relationships that can last with your fans is also important.

Make sure that you constantly expand your page by reminding people to join. Ask and answer questions with your keywords (if possible), send updates and let people know what you’re doing.  The more active your page is, the more visible it is because every action taken by a member of your page is posted on his or her own profile with a link back to your page.

3: Use Twitter

With millions of Twitter updates every day, you want to make sure your message is out there on the popular micro blogging site as well. Tweets are showing up in real-time search results and with tools like http://search.twitter.com and Twitter management clients like TweetDeck and HootSuite that enable you to search and follow keywords, it’s critical to have your content show up when your ideal client does a search. You do need to spend some time every week on Twitter, in real time, responding, replying and sharing great resources (that support your objectives).

Recently the breakdown of Twitter searches were announced at the Chirp Conference. Apparently they have about 19 billion searches per month. If we are comparing this to major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo – it passes Bing and Yahoo combined. This is an unbelievable statistic and shows the volume of people that use Twitter these days.

* Google: 88 billion per month
* Twitter: 19 billion per month
* Yahoo: 9.4 billion per month
* Bing: 4.1 billion per month

Here are some other interesting Twitter metrics:

* 105,779,710 registered users.
* 300,000 new users per day.
* 180,000,000 unique visitors to Twitter.com
* 60 per cent of new accounts are outside the US.
* 75 per cent of traffic is not on Twitter.com.
* 100,000 registered apps

With 19 billion queries per month, if they can combine that with their advertising system, they will be making a lot of money.