Guest post contributed by SEO freelancer Ryan Chaffin. This is Part 3 of a three-part series on The Power of Social Media. Read Part 1, The Power of Local Search Marketing, and Part 2, The Power of Long-Tail Keyword Phrases.
Social Media: The Power of Consistent Activity
Photo Credit: Ivan Walsh (flickr)
Blogging is a powerful tool for social media marketing. It is also a relatively easy process that a website of any size can incorporate into its marketing strategy. Blogging has also become increasingly powerful in the last couple of days since Google’s recent SEO changes.
Is a Lively Blog More Interesting to Google?
It has been rumored about that Google has changed their algorithms to favor sites that consistently show activity. This means there is a serious potential for ratings boosts for any websites that provide consistent activity with social media marketing efforts such as blogging. So whether you are a huge company looking to target keywords such as “hire truck drivers“ on a nationwide campaign or you are a small company who only provides local services and want to target something like “home renovations Toronto” (as discussed in part 2 of this series), this change could affect your website’s rankings for good or for bad depending upon your consistency of activity.
These recent changes make link building less effective and give even the smallest websites a fighting chance. Don’t misunderstand, link building is still important.
That’s why other types of social media marketing such as posting articles to article directories with backlinks and placing links on status updates and forums should still be practiced; however, at this point, no one should be underestimating the power of consistent activity on their website.
In fact, since Google does value consistent activity higher than ever before, this means that social media followers can help you to rank even higher by participating on your blog with comments.
Ensuring You Have Consistent Activity on Your Blog
Encourage More Comments
Comments posted on your website’s blog will qualify as activity which means that social media just took another giant step when it comes to its effectiveness on Google’s search engine algorithms. After all, what makes a site more relevant than one that is consistently growing, evolving and increasing in information and customer interaction?
This is why it is incredibly important to encourage as much activity on your websites as possible.
BizChickBlogs Soap Box: Read the 4 Irrefutable Laws of Blog Commenting if you don’t think comments matter. Then, download and install CommentLuv so that people will actually WANT to comment on your blog. All done now.
Encouraging Social Media Interaction
Another way to encourage consistent activity using social media tools is to include “like” buttons from Facebook on your website. All forms of new activity are things that Google likes to see. The power of consistent activity is something that a website of any size can participate in which helps to broaden the abilities of anyone to rank higher on the search engines.
Posting blogs more frequently, encouraging comments, adding social media features and making a presence on sites like Twitter and Facebook will give anyone the opportunity to rank better in the search engines.
Caution: You Should Still Rely on Methods that Work
A word of caution, though – many who hear about new algorithm changes from Google focus only on the new changes and do not stick with past proven methods.
This is unwise.
A huge part of social media marketing is having a variety of components that all carry weight. Continue to build links. Continue to focus on local search marketing. These methods still carry weight and can mean the difference between you and your competitors’ rankings.
The power of consistent activity, though, is taken very seriously which means that a well-rounded marketer who can participate in all of these social media strategies will undoubtedly reap the benefits in the long run.
About Ryan Chaffin
