How Using Social Media for Marketing Means Blogging

Using social media for marketing is best done when your plan includes both exceptional Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and blogging. Social Media Marketing is an integral component to any SEO plan, especially if you are promoting a blog, business, or both, in order to achieve a higher ranking on Google. Blog owners who are familiar with the blogging community and social media, understand the importance of social sharing.
They are also familiar with nuances of it, like page rank and the difference between dofollow and nofollow links. If you are a local or small business owner who is new to either SEO, blogging, social bookmarking, or using social media for marketing, then this article is directed at you (or if you’re anybody new to blogging really :-)). To aid in their integration of blogging into their online marketing plan and using social media for marketing, one of my biggest aims is to help in the understanding of Search Engine Marketing (SEM). SEM, Social Media, and Blogging all go hand in hand!

Small Business Blogging Part 1: Starting New Blogs + Creating Accounts

You need to create or utilize social profiles with links to your website on them. Also, the top sites, this includes Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn. There are many more as well, but you would go by popularity once you’re at this point. You can use these profiles to promote, or “link” to your site, this gives you “credit” with Google. However you don’t want to spam, that’s for certain, so be literally, natural. To be specific, see how much your competitors (or peers, or people you like) post and analyze how much that is and why, then emulate it as you see fit.

First: what is the difference between backlinks from social networks?

To first understand what roles these links play, you must understand the concept of page rank. In our post last week we talked about page rank. About how it can be increased by gaining back links from other high page rank websites. To increase your page rank, you don’t need only high page rank back links, but any time you increase your back links, you increase your page rank too, in a theoretical sense. It is important to note that in order to have a solid grip on your SEO plan, you must include gaining back links from authoritative, high page rank websites.

Nofollow vs. Dofollow

The vast gap or difference that separates nofollow links from dofollow links is their ability to pass on page rank. As you can assume by name, nofollow links are the less praiseworthy of the two. They are links that are coded to tell Google not to pass on the page rank on to the targeted website. Wikipedia defines nofollow as, “a value that can be assigned to the rel attribute of an HTML a element to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring.” An example of a nofollow link is: <a href=”http://www.site.com/”rel=”nofollow”>anchor text</a> Therefore, dofollow links are the ones you want.
However, a link is a link. You cannot eliminate the need for nofollow links altogether because of their diminished search ranking influence. Here are the top two reasons: 1. The occurrence of nofollow back links within your back link profile, and not just dofollows, will make your SEO seem natural and organic, and Google will not confuse it with spam. 2. As a small business blogger, any PR and exposure to your blog is good. Gaining the “link juice” or authority from high page rank sites and dofollow links is great. But, getting to the top of Google isn’t the only way to boost your traffic. Social bookmarking and getting your content out to social media sites in any case, will always be good.

Coming up: Using Social Media for Marketing | Small Business Blogging Part 2

We hope this cleared up any confusion between what a dofollow or nofollow link is. This is the first part of a mini-series featuring topics covering small business blogging. There will be much more to read and learn about social media and blogging, including our next topic: Content Writing. Stay tuned this week for more free resources on using social media for marketing!