April.Roberts@morganstanley.com
Call whenever u get this. I need to be in Ocean tomorrow for a service. I am very worried as I got in late & am unsure of my bb alarm.
Monday, November 29, 2010
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Why the Interest Graph Will Reshape Social Networks (and the Next Generation of Internet Business) | Assetmap
We might develop something on the DAR Wiki about interest graphs.
Why the Interest Graph Will Reshape Social Networks (and the Next Generation of Internet Business)
Posted by Nathaniel Whittemore on Nov 19, 2010 in Social Web | http://blog.assetmap.com/?p=101">View Comments
With the massive supremacy of Facebook in the social networking space, it’s easy to assume that the door is closed for social network innovation. The reality, however, is that we’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of how we interact with and derive value and pleasure from our networks. There is good reason to think that even the way we think about who is in our social networks is going to undergo massive change, driven in part by our new access to strangers with common interests.
Thesis 1: The Interest Graph is Different than the Social Graph – In a great post on TechCrunch in October, Naval Ravikant and Adam Rifkin articulated the difference between the “social graph” (the network of people you know personally) and the “interest graph” (the network of people who share interests with you, but who you don’t necessarily know personally). If Facebook is the service with the internet’s most complete (visible) social graph, Twitter is the service with the internet’s most complete (visible) interest graph. “Following” a person — even one you don’t know — is an affirmation of your interest in their insights and recommendations. “Friending” someone is simply an act of acknowledging an existing relationship, that in many cases, has more to do with a previous shared experience (think: your freshman dorm) than with a really active shared interest.
Thesis 2: The Interest Graph and Social Graph are good for different things – After spending a day or two in Silicon Valley, one could be forgiven for thinking that the future is everything you’re doing now, but done with your friends and that the best filters and recommendations are not algorithms but friend recommendations. But for as valuable as friend recommendations and sharing can be for some things, they aren’t a panacea. One look at the landscape of social music services validates that fact.
I’m pretty music crazy. I’m listening 100% of the time I’m working (which is a lot), and because of that constantly searching for new things. I was extremely excited when the founders of Kazaa, Skype, and Joost launched a new social music company called Rdio.
Rdio does a great job of making music sharing social. From an interface perspective, you get a real time feed of what your friends on Rdio are listening to, and it’s dead simple to share out a song or album across Facebook or Twitter.
But guess what? My friends have absolutely terrible music taste. That awesome stream of my friend’s music patterns? Worthless, because they’re listening to crap. Of course that’s entirely subjective, but that’s the point.
Music, movies, books, articles — these are all things where people have tastes that aren’t always influenced by friends – or at least not a big group of your friends. It’s no surprise to me that the most successful music services so far are things like Last.fm and Pandora that are far more organized around your musical interest graph than your musical social graph.
Of course, the social graph is still great for lots of things: recommending which parties you want to go to, which events are valuable to attend, etc. The point is just that there is not a 1:1 relationship between the things you like and the things your friends like, and what’s more, the friends you shared interests with 5 years ago may have become interested in fundamentally different things since then, even if they’re still your friends. Entrepreneurs are going to have to get smart about knowing which things fall into what category.
Thesis 3: The portion of both your Interest Graph and Social Graph that you care about is much smaller than the whole – One thing that is true of both our interest graphs and our social graphs is that the subsection of the graph that we actually care about is much smaller than the whole. On Twitter, for example, there are a small handful of influencers who anchor different interest categories, and whose perspectives carry far more weight than your average member of the interest graph. Within your social graph, there are people you are simply more close to – your family, your best friends..the people you would invite to your wedding. It seems like it would be smart for entrepreneurs interested in leveraging these graphs to concentrate on understanding the difference in value between an influencer or wedding attendee and their more removed counterparts. New life-sharing application Path is an example of a company doing exactly that.
Thesis 4: The Interest Graph is going to reshape your Social Graph – In real life, there is a constant interplay between the interest graph and the social graph. In high school, you gravitate towards people with common interests, and they become your social connections. In your professional career, you attend interest-specific events and connect with people who share that interest, but then become friends and start to share experiences.
There is a mirror process beginning to happen online. People are forming communities and connections through Twitter and social media like blogging around shared interests, which then spill over into the real world through meetups, conferences, and other offline happenings.
This process is going to reshape your social graph. It will be easier to find collaborators of all stripes, from band mates to business contractors. It will be easier to share your knowledge and experience with people who need it. It will be easier to do more of the stuff you want to do with people who can actually help you do it. And entrepreneurs who make this process easier and more fun stand to win big.
***
The point of all of this is not to argue about the value of the interest graph compared to the social graph. It’s simply to recognize that they’re different things, obey different social rules, have different opportunities and challenges and different types of value, and ultimately are influencing each other in increasingly interesting and complex ways.
Like always, the most successful entrepreneurs and investors will be the people who not only take advantage of the increasing clarity between these two graphs, but through their products and services amplify how we use them to make business and life more fun, easy, and successful.
Going back to the old communities of Interest idea, heck we might even revive USENET if this is the future.
Monday, November 22, 2010
Havering Folk Club News 21st November 2010
Havering Folk Club News 21st November 2010
Hi all,
Peter here with this week’s HFC newsletter.
Last Session: Another excellent open session on Wednesday, November 17th with guv’nor Simon Oliver taking on the MC’s mantle for the first time in goodness knows how long. He kicked off the performances and subsequently introduced, in no particular order, Andy Roberts, Foxen, Paul Turner, Dennis Homes, Pep Pepper, Bernie & Maureen Pilgrim, Sheila Granger step-dancing, accompanied by John and Bernie, Clive Paish, Linda Paish separately this week for a change, not as Ploughman’s lunch, William Saint, Jane Thomson, Tony Thomson, myself plus virgin performer Barry all the way from Harrow. Hope to see you again Barry.
From the Guv’nor: Well, actually no; it’s still Pete. Unfortunately the guv’s computer crashed as he tried to send me his copy for me to cut and paste and I didn’t receive it. His epistle was too long for me to take down by hand so his comments will be held over until next week.
Other Stuff: This coming Tuesday, 23rd November, familiar Haverface Kriss Pouch is the guest artist at Romford Folk Club, The Sun, 47 London Road, Romford, RM7 9QA. The compere is Mick Brown and the session starts at 8pm
On Thursday, 25th November, Loughton Folk Club will be playing some medieval dance tunes and also teaching the dance steps to some simple Branles – miming circle dances. Free admission to anyone in authentic medieval dress. This takes place at The Loughton Club, 8 Station Rd., Loughton, IG10 4NX, or contact Jim Coombes on 0776 214 6623.
The traditional Folk Carol Service is now in its 33rd year and takes place once again on Sunday 12th December from 6.30pm - 8pm. The venue is St. Clements Church, Broadway, Leigh-on-Sea, and as well as our own Foxen, it will also feature The Famous Potatoes, The Honeygales, Sweet Bells handbell ringers, John Coppin, Jack Forbes, Peter Monk, Roy Brown, Suzanne Higgins, John Smith, Chrissy King and Ken MacKinnon. Entry is appears to be free (No doubt Foxen will let me know if this is not the case) but there will be a collection in aid of the homeless, famine and church charities. If anyone would like to put up a poster for this event, let me know and I’ll forward a JPEG for you to download.
Christmas Dinner: Our Christmas Dinner is to be on Wednesday, 22nd December at the Golden Lion, 7.30pm for 8pm. All are welcome whether you are a regular or just an occasional visitor. We’ll probably do as we did last year and have a singaround of one song each after we’ve finished eating.
The cost is just £12.79 per person and the menu is as follows
Starters: Breaded Mushrooms with garlic and mayonnaise Prawn Cocktail Soup of the Day
Mains: Roast Turkey , roast potatoes, etc Roast Beef, roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding etc Grilled Salmon Fillet, lemon & dill sauce, roast pots etc
Vegetarian - Wensleydale and red onion pie roast pots, etc
Desserts: Christmas Pudding with brandy sauce Profiteroles with ice cream or cream New York-style cheesecake with toffee-flavoured sauce and cream
Publicising Your Event: Just a reminder that I’m more than happy to publicise any Haverfolks’ gig or event in this newsletter, which now has a subscriber list of over 230, but you have to tell me. I don’t have time to scout round everyone’s website/Facebook etc to find out. I send the newsletter round on either Saturday or Sunday depending on what I’ve got arranged for the weekend, so if you have something on, say a Friday or Saturday, I need to know prior to the weekend before that.
Incidentally, I’ve de-activated my Facebook account as I found the thing a damned nuisance, so you’ll have to e-mail me here rather than send a Facebook message.
Back to HFC: We have another open session this coming Wednesday, 24th November and as usual, all are welcome to come along and claim a floor spot. The following Wednesday, 1st December is a featured evening for the aforementioned Haverman Mick Brown, plus floor spots – so make it a date – Wednesday at eight!
Cheers – Peter
If you no longer wish to receive this newsletter, simply reply with the word “Unsubscribe”.
Havering Folk Club, The Golden Lion, 2 High Street, Romford, RM1 1HR
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Thursday, November 18, 2010
11/18 Andy Roberts
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Monday, November 15, 2010
Why Social Media Is a Better Investment than SEO
Written on November 8th, 2010 at 12:11 am by Guest Blogger
Why Social Media Is a Better Investment than SEO
This guest post is by Gary Arndt of Everything-Everywhere.com
As a blogger, you probably do not have the luxury of having a staff of people to work for you. As such, your time is very valuable and you need to spend it where it will do the most good. We have reached a point in late 2010 where the work required to generate traffic for a normal blog via search engines is much greater than that required to generate an equal amount of traffic via social media.
My thesis is simple: for the majority of bloggers, the time and effort invested on social media is better spent than time spent on SEO.
This post will probably generate controversy. There are an army of people out there who make a living selling SEO products and services. To use an old adage, when you only tool is a hammer, every problem is a nail. To them, SEO is the beginning and end of traffic generation.
To be sure, search engines do drive a lot of traffic, however, with the increasing pollution of search engines with content farms, Google’s love of big brands/big media, and the increasing amount of work required to rank for ever longer keywords, SEO is no longer worth the effort for most bloggers.
The power of brands
Google loves brands. The reasoning behind this actually makes some sense. An easy solution to the problem of spam websites was for Google to give extra authority to sites that have large, established brands. This doesn’t bode well for bloggers, however.
To given you an example of how much authority brands are given, several months ago I conducted an experiment. I had an article that I had done some link building on. After several months the article ranked #3 for the keyword I was targeting (behind two large media properties). I had an opportunity to put some content on the website of a very large media brand. I put that article, word for word, on their site to see how they would rank for the exact same keyword. Within an hour, they were ranked at #4, just behind my original article. In a day, they were ranked above me, even though the same content had been on my site for months and I had gone through the effort to do link building.
I realize there is a new content bonus that Google will give articles for a while, but the fact they were able to rank so high, so quickly, even against a previously indexed article with links, shows just how much the deck is stacked against blogs. Google can’t easily tell the difference a legitimate blog from a made for Adsense spam site. If they could, there would be no spam.
If you are in a niche that doesn’t have a large traditional media presence (niches like Internet marketing, SEO, or social media) you might not notice this because there is little media competition. However, if you are in a niche with a large traditional media presence (like travel, politics, news, sports, or food) you might see on a regular basis how difficult it can be.
Brand vs. individual authority
You might think that Darren Rowse has a great deal of authority on the subject of blogging. You would be correct. However, in the eyes of Google, Darren doesn’t have any authority; ProBlogger.net does. This is a fundamental problem with how Google works. People invest trust and authority in other people while Google puts authority in URL’s.
As a thought experiment, lets say Darren sold ProBlogger.net and started up a new blog called The-Blogging-Pro.info (a horrible domain name, but just stay with me). Everyone who reads this site, subscribes to the newsletter or follows Darren on Twitter would know to now go to the new site to get Darren’s advice on blogging. The authority that Darren has developed over the years would stay with him, even if he moved to a new domain. Google, however, would still put its trust and authority in ProBlogger.net, even though the real authority has moved to a different domain.
Social media solves the authority dilemma. You know who is authoritative and isn’t. I often ask people how many people they can name who have written an article for National Geographic in its 122-year history. Most people can’t name a single person. Yet, if I ask them who is behind their favorite blogs, almost everyone can give me a name. We trust the New York Times or National Geographic because of the reputation the brand has developed over the years. Even if the author of a given article knows nothing about the subject (which does happen), they are assumed to be authoritative just because of the brand they are writing under.
Writers will usually give a list of the publications they have written for as their credentials. Their authority is a second hand authority derived from the publications they have written for. (“I am a successful author because I have written for large, successful publications.”)
Blogger authority is first hand authority. It comes directly from the reputation they have developed over time from their audience.
The power of individuals
The fact that people know who bloggers are is exactly the reason why blogs have a comparative advantage in social media. The New York Times Twitter account might have millions of followers, but they can never do more than pump out links to articles. It can’t have a conversation, talk or listen. If it did, who would be the one doing the talking on behalf of the brand?
The part of social media that actually builds trust and authority is totally absent from most large media properties. They are simply not able to engage in a conversation as a brand. Some companies like ESPN have banned their staff from using Twitter precisely because they didn’t want their employees to develop their own authority outside if the network. If they did, they’d become too valuable and they would have too much leverage when it came time to negotiate contracts.
Bloggers have the ability to do an end run around traditional media precisely because we are capable of having a conversation. That is something a faceless brand can never do.
SEO is time consuming
Critics of this article might point out that if you just worked harder, you could rank for anything you want. They are probably right. It isn’t a question of what is possible. It is a question of the return on your investment. The concept of time ROI is absent from almost any discussion on SEO.
As I stated above, the deck is stacked against the little guy in SEO. Google loves brands and can’t associate authority with individuals. To just keep pace with media brands, you have to put in much more work. The New York Times doesn’t have to bother with link building. You do. That alone should tell you how fair the playing field is.
Bloggers have a comparative advantage in social media. We can appeal to human notions of authority, not algorithmic notions. We can have discussions and conversations, and brands can’t do that. Moreover, it isn’t hard to do. All you have to do is talk and most of you are probably doing that now.
Already you are seeing a shift in some media outlets to superstar journalists. What is happening is the same thing you are seeing in the blogging world. People are putting their trust and authority into people, not the brands they work for. It will only be a matter of time before the superstar journalists realize they don’t need their media masters anymore.
Writing for humans vs. writing for machines
Despite what Google says, the key to good SEO isn’t writing for good content for people. This is a bald-faced lie which anyone who has spent time trying to rank for a keyword knows. Human beings enjoy alliteration, puns, jokes and other forms of word play, which are totally lost on an algorithm. What makes for a good article from a content farm is exactly the thing, which you should not do if you want to covert readers into subscribers. Content created with SEO in mind is more often than not fun to read.
Google’s original rational for the “create good content” argument was that people would naturally link to good content. That is no longer true. People share good content on Twitter and Facebook, which is either closed to Google, labeled as “nofollow”, or doesn’t have anchor text. The world Serge and Brin wrote their seminal paper for in the 1990’s doesn’t exist today.
Traffic as a means vs. traffic as an end
Newspapers have developed an obsession with visits and page views. Many bloggers have the same problem as well. They view raw traffic as the end game because they view the world though an advertising model. Under this paradigm, the more traffic you have the better, regardless how you get it or for what reason, because it will lead to more ad clicks.
Many bloggers have wised up to the fact that advertising isn’t the best way to make money. CPM rates keep falling and will keep falling so long as ad inventory grows faster than online advertising budgets. It has reached a point where to make money via advertising you have to either have an enormous media property or have an incredibly targeted site devoted to a very niche keyword.
Most blogs don’t fit into either category. They don’t have millions of page views per month, and they don’t niche themselves into talking about only instant coffee makers. In this middle space, what matters aren’t raw page views to generate advertising revenue. What matters is growing a loyal following of people who view you as authoritative in your area.
In this model, traffic is just a means to an end, not an end in itself. The real end is getting traffic to convert to subscribers and loyal followers. You will be more likely to get a follower from someone who views you as having authority rather than someone who is just looking for bit of information with no idea of who you are.
Google-proofing
Google changes their algorithm all the time. There are companies who have been destroyed by changes made at Google. Fortunes rise and fall based on how Google decides to rank sites. A major question you have to ask yourself is “how dependent do I want to be on Google?”
All the hard work you put into SEO can be destroyed, or at least significantly altered, but changes at Google. Authority and reputation with other people, however, doesn’t change on a whim.
Also, knowing that Google is going to change in the future, in what direction do you think it is going to change? My bet would be towards a greater reliance on social media and less reliance on links. I’m sure there are engineers at Google right now trying to figure out how to translate the authority and trust that individuals have into their search results.
Choose social media for greater ROI
I am not saying you should block Google from indexing your site. I am not saying search engine traffic is bad. In fact, there are blogs out there that would be best served by an SEO strategy.
What I am saying is that outside of a few things you can do in the creation of your blog, don’t worry about SEO. Make sure your permalinks make sense, create a site map, install the appropriate plugins … and then stop worrying about it.
Invest your time where it will give you the highest return. Today, I believe that place is in social media. Do you? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Since March 2007, Gary has blogged from over 70 countries at Everything-Everywhere.com. He was also named by Time Magazine as one of the 25 Best Blogs of 2010.
UPDATE: Darren has added his thougths on the SEO vs Social Media debate here.
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140 Responses to “Why Social Media Is a Better Investment than SEO” - Add Yours
Why would this post generate controversy? It’s 100% accurate and correct!
The days where one depends upon search engines for the majority of traffic are done and over (if you’re looking to create long-term success online). Social interactions, social media and social recommendations are what drives interest and traffic these days…with a far greater staying power than fickle SEO thingees.
Love the ‘google-proofing’ term, btw. Very true.
I completely agree with you. Social Media doesn’t assign us algorithms to deal with, but SEO does. Also SMO is much easier & less time consuming than SEO. In SMO we don’t have to please the Google God :P
Thanks for the emense amount of detail in your article. I have to say that i do think you have a point but the results are heavily dependant on which niche you are in. I know you meantioned it but i am in the internet marketing niche and i get much more traffic from search engines and i have tried to dedicate equal amounts of time to each traffic generating method. I see your point though, when you are in technology or news blogs it helps massively if you have a brand.
The overall effect is difficult to measure, but I take the 10000 (targeted and interested) visits from search engines for (nearly) 0 hours of work vs. the few who come in and bounce away after (re-)sharing for the countless hours I use in “social media”.
It’s been proven many times that the visitors from search engines are far more likely to turn into buyers than those from social media sites, that’s just how it is, people in social media expect things to be free – it’s many times harder to turn them into buyers.
Social media comes with other benefits, yes, but for (relatively) free traffic that bring results, you can’t beat SEO, sorry.
Gary, I agree whole heartedly with you. I remember when I was first trying to get into the whole website/blog thing, I would regularly search my keywords and see how I was doing, and read everything I could on SEO.
But when I read the kk.org article “1,000 true fans” everything changed in my view of how to go about it.
I’ve started doing blog posts with this approach:
- Write first for readers who like to read just what I like to read.
- If I really still have time (usually not) think about SEO. Not to hard
- Tweet (and if it is really relevant to my own real friends, share on Facebook manually).
This post just motivates me to push on with this much more enjoyable approach.
Interesting post, Gary…thanks for the food for thought.
I’ve never particularly worried about SEO. My biggest concession to SEO is probably in the way I title articles (making sure to include specific locations in titles, for instance). Makes for less than sexy titles f’sure.
I’m thinking Midwest US travel isn’t the most over-populated niche. The vast majority of my traffic comes from searches–and usually from search terms closely related to a specific destination or Midwest topic. That also means I have a disproportionately large number lot of new visitors each day.
I have mixed feelings about some SM efforts because I’m having a bit of trouble seeing how the disproportionate amount of time I seem to spend on it is vs. the number of visits I see from those links. My gut feeling is that a lot of my regular readers come from my SM efforts, but I’d love to know how visits I get via SM rank in metrics like length of visit, depth of visit, and loyalty vs. the new visitors I see via searches.
You have great points about the growing importance of social media and the falling ROI of SEO.
What I’m missing is an elaboration of how to grow authority in social media, and which social media outlets should I put my time in.
The FB group for my site already has over 1700 fans, but the traffic it generates is still very small in comparison with Google or with related sites in my niche.
I’d love to hear more tips about social media usage.What a great article. I will take what you’ve said as an extra incentive to spend more time improving my blog’s Facebook page. I write for a content site, where revenue is generated by ads and I have found the articles which bring in the biggest money are not very readable, but rather strings of keywords. So, I totally see your point!
I LOVE this post, Gary! I completely agree that bloggers, and companies for that matter, should spend their time in whatever is bringing in the highest ROI.
I have also found that good content creates the empathy with your readers that will ultimately be translated into “authority.”
Looking forward to more good insights!
Sharon Mostyn
@sharonmostynVery well said. I have noticed this especially in the food niche, more specifically recipe blogs. It’s totally impossible to rank anymore with the first page of results is filled with allrecipes and the like. I’ve since turned to social media and cooking communities and have stopped worrying about search engines. Great article.
This is article is funny on many levels, not the least of which is the fact that when leveraged effectively, social media efforts can be the biggest driver of SEO success. In other words, with every passing day, social media and SEO are becoming more and more intertwined. There’s no reason to pick one over the other.
That essentially renders the title of your post moot.
P.S. If you don’t take the time to craft SEO-friendly title tags (not the title of articles, but the meta element) you’re missing out on tremendous ROI potential.
[...] Read the rest of the article here…. [...]
Excellent points. The online world is like the offline world: to compete with the big dogs you either have to be a big dog or have a lot of money. But the little guy can build a small, devoted following by giving a personal touch.
Gary, this has been the kick in the butt I needed to spend more time and effort with social media. I’ve been somewhat active on Twitter very recently, but I have neglected my Facebook and LinkedIn presences. I have also struggled with the whole “keyword density,” etc., metrics, but I see now that I don’t need to stress TOO much about that.
This shows me where my time is better spent — on being a person who writes and shares useful content, not a machine. Thanks!
[...] Why Social Media Is A Better Investment Than SEO – Problogger [...]
Thank you for this. Great post. With SEO, we spend a lot of time spinning our wheels, trying to outguess Google, which, of course, Google doesn’t want us to do. Google wants the search process to be natural, tipped in favor of the searcher…not businesses.
And the fact is, I find that Social Media and blogging, if done well, give you that natural SEO that you need. A well done blog gives you everything Google wants to see: traffic, inbound links, changing content, key words, and more.
Definitely gonna share this article with clients and friends who think they need to spend a lot of money on SEO.
Great article, Gary! It basically sums up what I’ve noticed with my own online results. I also believe in a “quality vs quantity” philosophy of traffic, which is to say I’d rather have 5000 raving fans than 5 million people who accidentally stumble across my site via a search engine and immediately leave and never return. I do write my blog for people and have had a devil of a time with SEO. It boggles my mind a bit and when I have tried to focus on keywords, I haven’t necessarily seen the results from that because there’s just too much competition out there in the travel blogging world. Twitter is probably the best thing that’s ever happened to my blog. And I also enjoy the interactions I have with people via Twitter. I’ve met so many cool travelers and bloggers there, so it’s not just a more productive use of my time, but more personally rewarding as well.
Justin
I think there’s a lot of truth in what you say but I don’t think I’d throw the baby out with the bath water. We still need to keep our eyes on where traffic is and the most related terms that have traffic related to our posts. We don’t always have to address it but that awareness is key. We need to make conscious decisions about these things, to me it’s part of the process. There are still lots of niches and areas that can and should be optimized for. There are also many areas where we’re basically SOL in direct keyword SEO. Still though, with a little creativity related niches can be exploited for good use. For example, posts that refer to a brand might be able to leverage that brands traffic since there is often much less competition on the brand itself instead of related keywords. ; )
I know when I work on social media I do get an increase in traffic. Recently, I had the opportunity to be part of a weekly talk radio program. The traffic to the blog did increase. These increases were definitely more than all the SEO that I have done.
Hi,
A great article which is well written and you explain correctly.
From what I understood your metric is ‘traffic’.I agree social media does bring more traffic.
However, most websites/blogs sell a product/service/affiliate and content. I am not an expert in any way, but if you change the metric from ‘traffic’ to Click To Rate or actual sales, you will find that search engines give a much greater return on investment than Social Media.Note: For me social media includes Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Reddit etc.
Conclusion: if your metric is just traffic than I agree with the article.
Well written post, Gary, but I’m going to have to partially disagree. Not on everything, just with your last few points.
From first hand experience, I’ve seen the huge inflow that SEO can bring, both on my own site and on those of some of my clients at my previous job as an SEO. I completely disagree with your statement that “ROI is absent from almost any discussion on SEO” as you’ll see in my analogy below. SEO is not easy, but neither is social media if you’re doing it right. The rewards of both are great as well, but your investment into SEO will always be high and have to be high. Your investment into SEO does not in order to see a return.
I also do not agree completely with “writing for humans vs writing for machines.” With SEO, of course you must write to catch the eye of the bots, but now think of it from the opposite perspective of the reader. If you do a search on Google, how do you find what you want? You scan, looking for the keywords for what you’re looking for. Making your content SEO friendly helps the reader as well, even though you fail to see that. I agree that your content needs to be reader friendly and had valuable and interesting grammatical additions, but you don’t have to get rid of these to include SEO.
Your comparison between the two as “traffic as a means vs traffic as an end” is an interesting take and I think you’re on to something, but I don’t believe it is a disadvantage of SEO. Getting people to visit your site is a positive thing. Its your responsibility as a writer to keep them there.
And finally, while Google does change their algorithm, it is always for the better. If you’re writing for your reader, making clean, organized content highlighting what’s important, in the end you won’t be hurt. Darren has seen these effects in the past and when it’s happened, it sorted itself out in no time.
I think the most accurate comparison I can make is to your personal income. SEO is like a passive, residual income. You do it once and the rewards continue to flow in whether you work on it anymore or not. On the contrary, if you stop your social media presence, the majority of all advantages stop as well, including the most important: site traffic, personal brand image, and loyalty of readers/your reliability.
That said I do not argue your belief in social media as an extremely valuable medium. It is my belief as well, but a substitute for SEO it is not.
Gary:
You make excellent points, and overall I don’t find fault with your argument. However, I could make a case that what you said is akin to stating that “it is better to exercise than eat healthy foods”. Both choices support the obvious goal of a healthy lifestyle, but balancing each effort will always yield greater results over time.
I believe the better advice is to balance both efforts, SEO and Social Media. To be sure, SEO can be a mind numbing chore and it can take weeks, months, even years to see results, but once in place, quality SEO yields positive returns virtually forever. Well optimized content has always ranked in search queries.
By balance, I try to optimize most of the content I produce; whether it be a blog post or a web page. Once published, I use Social Media to promote and point to the new content. In this way, SEO provides the search engines with relevant content to help increase the authority of the site while Social Media creates immediate traffic and possibly additional links, which furthers the purpose.
As an web presence developer, one of the first things potential clients come to me and say is ‘I want to dominate with SEO, can you help me?”
This article is going to help me make them understand that SEO is not the be all end all of internet market.
Like you said, it is still a very powerful tool, but it is always changing. Trying to use nothing but SEO for traffic is extremely time consuming and never a guarantee.
Posting a link back to your new article from Facebook and Twitter however, are instant sources of traffic. Most of which is returning visitors that already feel you are an authority.
Thank you for posting this, I plan to link it to any new potential client that comes to me ranting and raving about SEO, while I try to convey the importance of building community and authority.
Thanks!
Actually, my metric would be “followers”, however that is defined. It could be RSS subscribers, email subscribers, twitter followers or Facebook fans.
The conversion metric you should worry about is converting traffic to followers. If you have followers, then you can sell any future product without reinventing the SEO wheel.
Very interesting article, Gary! I guess the ROI depends on what you are selling and whether your goals are short-term or long-term. I believe (and I hope) that readers are becoming more sophisticated and skeptical of advertising from unknown sources. At the risk of repeating a truism that is becoming almost trite, “people buy from people they know like and trust.”
Ironically, some of the machines are really only talking to other machines. Maybe bots and auto-responders are falling in love. In the long run I think relationships nurtured on social media will be worth more than transient traffic.
I think both seo and social media are key components in a successful web presence. Social Media will probably be more sustainable and you will be less reliant on Google.
Darren
I generally dislike posts from ProBlogger but this is REALLY, REALLY bad.
First,
“You will be more likely to get a follower from someone who views you as having authority rather than someone who is just looking for bit of information with no idea of who you are.” – Evidence? If someone comes from a search engine looking for ‘wedding rings’ and you provide extremely valuable information on that topic and a catalog, then you are instantly becoming an authority in their eyes.Second, have you ever done SEO? SEO can be done effectively if you write for humans, you just need to insert a few keywords here and there. And you aren’t writing for search engines…search engines are used by PEOPLE, those keywords are typed by PEOPLE so using those keywords doesn’t mean literally you’re optimizing for SEO but you’re optimizing for words PEOPLE type.
“What matters is growing a loyal following of people who view you as authoritative in your area.” >>> Says who? This is a big delusion. What matters is….can you guess…yeah Money. Because most people are blogging to make money. SEO traffic brings people who have some type of intent and you monetize them based on that intent. If people arrive through your site via digg/stumbleupon/reddit/facebook/twitter their “intent” is usually entertainment.
Derren could btw get the same authority into the-Blogging-Pro.info if he wanted to, he would just do a 301 redirect and that’s all.
Nevertheless, what’s the answer to “Is social media a better investment than SEO”? Like with most question, it is “it depends”. What’s your method of monetization? What niche are you in?
The fundamental flawed assumption here is that “authority is everything”. This is VERY difficult to prove. First, what is authority? Are all people perceiving authority in same way?
A better framework, I propose is to use the framework by Theodore Levitt: Be the company people want to “hire” to get a particular job done. Derren may be the authority for people looking to monetize/bring traffic to their blog. You may be the authority for ‘I want to find good places to travel and need to find someone who’s already been there’.
Things are way more complex and there are so many factors for a simple statement like ‘social media is better investment than seo’ (and I’m not sure if my comment is ‘perfect’ too).
“The conversion metric you should worry about is converting traffic to followers. If you have followers, then you can sell any future product without reinventing the SEO wheel.”
@Gary Arndt Exactly social media does not tend to convert as well as a search engine query.
In general, people use Facebook for entertainment purposes or Digg for browsing, and not purchasing. If someone searches for ‘Product X’ on Facebook, in my opinion they are less likely to buy a product than when a Google search is conducted for that product.
It will be interesting to see a study on this. Since I am just basing myself on experience.
Plenty of food for thought in this post. I agree that social media is important. The jury’s still out on whether it is a better time investment than SEO though.
I tend to agree with the previous poster, my conversion rate from search engine queries is higher than with social media. I guess the bigger question is whether that will change with time. We’ll have to see.
What an excellent article, reminds me that why my traffic is so low even though I am writing good content. I have really been struggling with what to spend my short amount of time on. Sounds like I started off right, will have to see where it takes me.
Social media investment is good if you have a generous budget to advertise your social media presence, to keep great prize contest if people become fans. Or social media works great if you are already a well developed brand and very popular. You can get the benefits by doing nothing. Seo can be a side effect of popularity.
If you have a small website with tight budget then you can work hard to make good seo, or to have someone to do it for you with low budget and get a lot of visitors.
You have a lot of valid points. That being said, you can’t argue with spending a small amount of time on trying to draw in more search traffic, right? After all, not everyone is involved in social media, emails links to each other, etc, but everyone uses search. Yeah, you’ll have way more competition if your vertical is dominated by a brand, but the same would be true of any marketing channel. What would be more valuable for a lot of people honestly would be a rundown of how to balance social presence building with search engine friendly content writing.
Gary, finally the light at the end of the tunnel. I’m glad you wrote about this as many people seem to think that Google is the answer to everything. More importantly, I would like to see how the current social media will change in Q1 & 2 next year as much has been said and discussed, then again… we shall see.
David
[...] is not gloom and doom, though. The first thing I want you to do is go read this very informative post about google and using social media and then come back here. It’s okay, I’ll wait. This [...]
I publish a mom-and-pop site that attracts more than four million visits a year, and I spend zero time on SEO beyond the obvious things that are in Google’s Webmaster guidelines (such as using descriptive titles and headlines, and organizing content in a logical way that’s useful to human readers).
Also, social networking works better for some topics than for others. In the travel-planning category (where my wife and I operate), the most interested–and desirable–readers are active travelers who are planning trips to Elbonia or Widgetville or Timbuktu. Reaching strangers who are researching trips (and who arrive via Google or Bing) is far more productive for us, and for advertisers, than reaching friends and followers at Facebook and Twitter.
Very informative article.
For me… I simply can’t imagine altering the copy of a post so that it gets more search engine traffic.
Getting your writing to sound and feel good is really hard and shouldn’t be compromised so that SEO is benefited.
People will share your stuff when your content is good. So making it as good as possible without compromising it one bit is wise.
Of course, it’s not enough to have good content for people to share your stuff. You have to also be known which you can accomplish through guest posts, and general interaction with other bloggers and readers.
Enjoyed this article and its implications.
I agree but I would have appreciated your definition of Social Media in the article… Also without content and SEO Social Media is gonna be a tough thing to do!
My blog is still an infant, only two month of posts and less than a month of analytics tracking. In that month, my forum links and social media presence have definitely been the best source of traffic for me, but my blog is about table top games, and design in particular, so those places are also the most likely place to find readers looking for that type of game.
Excellent point you make here Gary! Helping to influence the flow of traffic to either your blog or to a friends site, is becoming more and more complicated as time goes on. However, the same aspect of what causes successful traffic from coming to a site is the same. The respect and enjoyment of your readers. Without those, any site will eventually end up with little traffic if it ever gets it.
I track the sources for sales and inquiries. Have many been resulting from search? Only one this year. Most of my business is generated through both offline and online networking. On the online side, the inquiries are coming from my contacts in social media. Most of my blog traffic is generated through Twitter. So, yes, I totally agree that focusing on the connections and conversations is the way to go.
I see social media dominating Google. In fact, my top 5 sources of Internet traffic are mostly social media:
1. Facebook
2. Google
3. Kindle Boards
4. Twitter
5. GoodreadsFacebook is far ahead of Google in terms of sending me visitors, and Twitter is growing fast.
David
I totally agree! I’m about as ungeek as anyone can get, but we have managed to create one of the top blogs in travel without knowing anything or doing anything with SEO.
All of it was totally by accident, like our first Soultravelers3 youtube video going viral with over a million views. Social media rocks and is a lot more FUN than SEO because it’s all about connecting with fabulous people around the world. ;)
Thanks for this..Im finding Facebook to be incredible at building a strong fanbase. People who feel they can just talk to you and you can vibe with. They get to know your personality and are more likely to read what you have to say.
[...] My thesis is simple: for the majority of bloggers, the time and effort invested on social media is better spent than time spent on SEO. Read More [...]
Interesting read. However, I would argue that the effectiveness of social media vis-Ã -vis search engine optimization really depends on the nature of the website or blog. It is also worth bearing in mind that not all potential customers/readers of your website will be active in social networks. On balance, the time investment for social media is sometimes just too high compared to SEO.
I’ve really enjoyed this article. I’ve been blogging for about 14 months without any real concern for SEO or keywords. (My blog is not monetized) Ninety percent of my marketing of my site has been through twitter. In fact, sometimes I feel like I am working towards being a personal brand of a sort. Granted I know that I know that what I am doing is small, and my traffic would make you laugh, but the essence of this article: Build your credibility, build your authority and use social media to do that, really resonated with me.
About 50% of my traffic is organic google results, and another 20% is direct (I assume that means bookmarked ?) and the rest from an assortment of places. However the 6% of my traffic from twitter represents people who really stay and read content and are likely to leave comments too. I’d say that nearly all (80% to 90%??) the comments on my blog are from people who have a twitter profile.
@SabrinaMantle – I went and looked at your twitter profile and your blog. You’re not following very many and it doesn’t look like you are having a lot of twitter conversations. Maybe be a little more social. :)
@Darren – You honed in on “What matters is growing a loyal following of people who view you as authoritative in your area”
^ All I have is anecdotal evidence, but I think that is true. At some point, if you have one niche that you know a lot about, and people begin to associate your name with that niche, you’ll get all kinds of questions coming in to you … I know I get a couple of emails a month from people who just want answers, and then there are many more tweets. I don’t want to talk traffic numbers, and in the big scheme of things, I’m small, but I am seeing the ways that what Darren describes above is coming to life for me.I totally agree regarding the importance of social media, Gary. But what I immediately noticed, and found hilarious, is your Twitter account! In two years you’ve tweeted 4 times. What avenues are you using for social media? I love a bit of irony :)
I would like to summarize this post with “wide comunication brands it’s better than only seo and sem activities”…
Then is the reverse true? If I manage a well-established brand, then I am better off investing in SEO than in exposing my brand to the vulnerabilities and threats that come with social media.
Elisabeth
Thank you for an excellent article that comes at a perfect time. I’ve had one page ranking highly on Google for several months and just got bumped down lower than several sites that are nothing more than stuffed keyword lists. It has been very disheartening and this is giving me the boost I need to dust myself off and get back to work!
Thanks for the great post. I am new to the blogging world, and the more I read the more questions I have. I need the 101 to blogging! You have offered some great input, and I look forward to more posts.
I agree… to some extent… social media (participating on social networks and other blogs) is a great way to build your profile and attract visitors – especially when you just started. However it is very time consuming too.
SEO should be a long-term strategy, it’s true that ranking well is becoming more difficult everyday, but I have the feeling that standing out amongst the millions of ‘gurus’ using Social Media to promote themselves is becoming increasingly difficult too.
So I would say that you need both, and you could actually kill 2 birds with one stone by providing valuable content (as mentionned in other comments – write for users not Search Engines, Google ultimately values unique and quality content) on websites that will not only attract direct traffic and build your authority, but will also assist with your search engine rankings (watch out for no follows).
Online Marketing is much more that focusing on one channel only. If you want to get more readers consider all tactics: PPC, SEO, Social Media, Email Marketing and even Ads and Affiliate Marketing – but as usual it’s a question of time and budget.
Just the fact that you can interact with the people who like your brand with social media makes it great to build a strong brand. Your brand is portable from one social platform to another. Your fans will follow you.
Hi Gary,
I disagree with most of the points you’ve shared in your post.
Yes, I’m an SEO in case you’d ask. But then I’m also a social media marketer and an entrepreneur.
Generally, I do agree that in some ways people are confined with the rules set in place by the different search engines (not just Google), however most of these developments are design experiments to make our experiences more humanized and intuitive–it is after all their business to make every search result as relevant as possible to their customer (us)–and that is a constant evolving process.
On the other hand, I’d like to point out that you’re discussing SEO here only in the objective sense and you’re missing out a lot on the subjective side of things.
Just to share, most of us love well designed products (e.g. Apple products, IKEA products, etc.) because not just because they are aesthetically pleasing but also because they function well in relation to our needs.
SEO works the same. There’s a great deal of appreciation for technical aspects (e.g. as with design there’s behavioral science, ergonomics, visual design, interaction design, etc.) to create a seamless experience.
I’m not sure if you hadn’t noticed but the best optimized sites are sites that are consumed best–I’m referring to sites that are easy to read, easy to navigate, loads fast, have great content, and so forth–not the ones that are spammy with totally unrelated and irrelevant links and keywords.
In addition, SEO is not about traffic, it’s actually about conversion. It’s quite useless to hire an SEO to build traffic and not convert right? It just doesn’t make sense.
We know SEs don’t rank meta descriptions, but why do we have to write them well? Yes, it is to convert.
It’s also an important note to share that search in general is also becoming more social, not that it’s eating up the value of social media but what I’m saying is, is there really a difference between both?
To me, it’s just ‘optimization,’ we need to create efficient sites/services/products not for the now, or the then, but for something more lasting.
Social media alone can boost ROI, fast, but how sustainable is it for example Facebook gets boring? Or Twitter suddenly is not cool anymore?
Lastly, no amount of marketing can save a lousy product. Here at ProBlogger.net, I don’t think it’s about Darren doing just SEO or just Social Media, it’s about doing what he does best while considering all the aspects that affect it.
It is a matter of forming cultures of discipline, not cooking instant noodles for the now or the next.
P.S. Another example would be having a great performing car with lousy interiors and vice versa. The relationship between SEO and Social media (and design, usability, content) is an inseparable discipline–in an amoeba economy, we can’t rely on cultures of complacency.
I might have missed in the article, but social media & SEO are not mutually exclusive. Part of good SEO campaign is inbound links. Any time you post a link to your site and it gets indexed, you just did some SEO work.
As far as time investment – for Social Media it is huge. You have to be constantly saying in Social Media. Whatever you said will be forgotten so because somebody else competing you for attention will post an updated, or “engage”, or “converse”. Your message lifecycle is very short in SM. What you get for free in tools you make up for in time investment.
This article doesn’t talk enough about Social Media and instead focuses on why SEO is hard. Social Media isn’t easy, and one being a better investment than the other also completely depends on your skill set and capabilities.
For many SEO Experts, SEO is easy and far less time consuming than trying to please the masses of Social Media that have opinion about everything and nothing at the same time.
Also, writers from large blogs like Techcrunch and Mashable get credibility because they write for those blogs. They’re still bloggers. In my opinion the best bloggers are those that create Brands that will last if they move on to other adventures. At least if we’re talking in terms of business investment.
Try and step away from your Social investment and go a new direction and see how well your blog lasts then.
You make a great point here. I personally believe that to achieve optimal results, you really need a good balance of SEO and social media. They are as important and effective as each other. I also agree that different industries require different focus in each area.
Gary,
Nicely stated!
The problem, as you know, is most people still live by the old rules (SEO) and don’t see how everything else is playing out. More than anything, anybody can become a ‘brand’ now because of the one-to-one connection social tools provide. People now ‘vote’ with their RT’s and ‘Likes’, they’ll remember your @ and not your URL. All you have to do is spend a few months networking on Twitter and you’ll grow an authentic audience.
Cheers,
Jorge.
i am always getting emails from guys who can make me number one OK fine but why wont they do it by ‘paid on results’?
Maybe they are not that great and wonderful on the game of SEO.
Very informative! This article for me is useful since I was thinking if I’m going to use Social Media or SEO for my blog. Now I realized that writing for human is better than writing for machines.
Thanks for this.
I agree fully with this article. Very good and insightful job on this posting. Social media blog marketing is the SEO of the future. Low cost, DIY, that almost anyone can learn in order to have a chance at a decent ranking in regards to local search terms.
If time and patience is not on their side, they can certainly outsource it to an experienced and capable Social Media Strategist.
Yes, the ultimate objective, and what really matters is “growing a loyal following of people who view you as authoritative in your area”. That trust and loyalty will translate into happy consumers willing to spend money on a product or service you recommended from a business they can trust.For me, social media sucks. I’m sticking with seo.
My blog is still an infant, only two month of posts and less than a month of analytics tracking. In that month, my forum links and social media presence have definitely been the best source of traffic for me, but my blog is about table top games, and design in particular, so those places are also the most likely place to find readers looking for that type of game.
Social media lends itself better to blogging than SEO in my opinion as it allows the blogger to communicate directly with a chosen “audience” almost on a 1-2-1 basis.
This is not possible through a traditional search engine.
The majority of my new readers are coming via twitter, facebook etc.
Perfect. I am sure Google must be working on algo to leverage links shared on twitter, fb likes and other social media platforms
While I don’t think we should discount making sure our blogs / sites are appropriately optimized, or toss out the idea of inbound linking, I work with a lot of small businesses and organizations and agree with you.
I can help them get the word out and get them engaged in becoming the authority (for their audience) much faster and much more economically than I can for SEO alone.
Thanks Gary, for this very refreshing insight into branding versus SEO.
I agree wholeheartedly, and like that you added a caveat that it’s still important for both to work in tandem.
I think so long as those of us who don’t obsess SEO remember to deliver striking content that attracts links, we won’t go far wrong.
Being recognised as an expert is, has, and always will be the most important part of building your business. Focus on that, and we can rest easy (so long as you really do live, eat and breathe your promises, of course).
Nicely done.
Dave Thackeray
Interesting post. SEO has never been a huge concern of mine, but then again, my blog is not where I make money, but rather a platform for me to get other gigs and make money on other sites. When being hired for those gigs, they want to see that I have a “following,” which is much easier to get through engaging others in social media rather than the in-and-out of search-engine visits. I do the basics of SEO – pay attention to post titles, pack keywords early in the post, title all my pictures, etc – but when I write a post that resonates with PEOPLE (and not search words), and they Stumble that post, my traffic goes crazy. That, for me, is what works.
Sorry but I don’t agree with with the post statement.
I think that both SEO and Social Media leveraging each other. The more traffic you get from SEO, more readers will share your content in the different social media networks.
I have an assumption that the more traffic you’ll drive from social media will generate more traffic from SEO. I believe/guess that Google uses our analytics report to identify valuable content.
This article got me to think about things in a way I have not thought about before. In the past few months I have thought about link building almost exclusively. Social media, despite my best efforts, doesn’t make me any money and actually brings me less traffic then google does. So for now, I have to continue working both SEO and social media together.
SEO is such a sore subject with me. I cannot tell you how much time that I have spent on SEO vs using that time to develop my writing. I finally had to free myself from the SEO monster and move forward.
Great post!I’d love to see a ‘dummies guide to social media’. I’ve read countless articles on how social media is beneficial, etc, etc. But a concise guide as to how to use Digg, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, etc would be very helpful.
About all I’ve accomplished w/ social media is placing links on my site and an occasional Digg or report on Facebook. Do I need to be more aggressive with my passing articles to my friends and spamming their facebook? Or is it generally accepted ‘noise’ for those not interested?
Wow! I think it’s all been said!
I agree- I don’t worry too much about SEO. i put the bells and whistles on (plug in’s, etc…) and then just write like I talk, maybe with a few keywords, maybe not if it compromises what I have to say…
I do a lot of self-promotion on Social Networking sites, Twitter, etc….
According to my stats most traffic comes from my promotional efforts, not a search engine…….
I have always been aware that Google occasionally changes up what they are looking for , so I’m not tied to one promotional strategy.
Like everyone else, you need a controversial subject line to get people to read and react – its all good. Many great points that I completely agree with – bad advice if you want to tell people to avoid SEO. Yep, its work, but you need to do it all to some extent – don’t drop one for the other, social is only as good as its shared.
Wow! – This is one of the best posts I have ever read on this site. Gary, (Guest Blogger)I think your words hit the mark right on. Thanks for this article! I made reference to it in my blog today.
Great encouragement for a beginning blogger.Thanks
This article is Pure Content with a capital C, and a welcome breath of fresh air. Loved what you had to say about breaking the chains of SEO domination. I’ve been led to believe I was totally dependent upon Google’s acceptance. Thanks for the encouragement.
Good written post, Gary. The old saying that knowledge is power has never been truer. The online world is all about knowledge; those who have the most knowledge will succeed online.
This is the reason why I have invested more in social media and have made my SEO simply adjunct to my social media campaign. If Google trips on you – there is no way to get back. If a social media site closes down, you can simply reestablish contacts through your email list.
Heck, I’ve even developed this altruistic notion that I should stop keyword stuffing and to simply place content for public service despite my full knowledge that Google is automated. But deep within, it’s because I know that I would like to share my content with my social media campaign and this is why I’d have to drop the spinning and the stuffing.
Thanks for this article to help me realize the natural developments in my thinking.
I have to agree that SEO is difficult, though not impossible, and social media is a powerful medium. The name social media states as clear as day two powerful theories and also has the very appreciated free usage.
Obviously social means talking and interaction between individuals. As a business owner that means free positive buzz for me. Having socialites sell a product to each other is a God send. It also allows for you to generate brand awareness and popularity!
Media is probably the most expensive medium to use for sales. Radio and television are extremely costly. Bringing social media into the equation ads that lovely world free. TV and radio are mainly to raise acknowledgement and publicity of your product.
Another benefit is ease of implementation. SEO is stressful, plain and simple. Social media on the other hand is as easy as setting up a webpage and getting people to” like” the page. Awesome post, you are right on point!You have some good points – particularly against competing with big brands.
The thing about SEO however from what I have learned is that you should circumnavigate big brands, edu sites and other high authority sites in any case as even if Google didn’t give them the easy SEO route more than likely they have large budgets which they can invest in SEO if they need to.
This is where long tail keywords witg low competition come in
So going on that, you do need to keep an eye on SEO but not get to caught up in it and you do need to integrate with Social Media.
The problem I find with Social Media like FB is that there are groups for everything so people must get the Ad blindness like they would with too many banners.
Its a tricky game……..
great ad i do a lot of promoting an this is great info i will use this info i do SEO & social media to drive traffic to my site or anyone who i help with this said i feel that social media is the way to go an SEO is time consuming but both work great.
I strongly agree with you!
Always being a beginner, and an learner, I confirm that all time spent on SEO was lost compared to smaller investment with Twitter.
Now I devote my efforts to content as much I can.Interesting article, but I can’t help to disagree with you. Bottom line, Social Media is great, but a lot of Social Media is about SEO. In order for Social Media to be effective, you need to consider the principles of SEO – links, metrics, human traffic, and rankings – not to mention book-ending your social media with a quality website.
Too many people obsess over rankings and algorithms when it comes to SEO, but it is all about customer engagement, usability standards, and more importantly conversions and sales.
Not to mention the fact numerous studies have been done to prove if Social Media sites such as Twitter where great at driving traffic. Turns out the findings were all the same – the vast majority of traffic came from Google.
My opinion, if you feel the need to abandon SEO and using search engines to drive qualified traffic, I wish you and your site the best of luck. However, I highly suggest integrated SEO and Social Media together, because that is where you’ll get the highest ROI. If people are searching, they’re likely discussing the topic in the social world. If your peers suggest a service/product socially, and can also be found in search engines, that will lead your users on the path to conversion. No matter how you spin in it, Google is the driving force of Digital Marketing… like it or not, it’s just the way it is.
I love this post….which does boil down to writing for humans vs. machines.
As always, it’s about the people that use those machines. Connect with people and everything follows, which works very much the same in the real world too…
I say use both SEO + Social Meda, SEO can still give you a ton of traffic and behind SM, SEO will be a main source of traffic.
Jason fox
I work with real estate professionals and help them with maerketing. Inevitabley they are interested in learning about SEO. It is like the magic pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I like to say that while i do not think you should ignore SEO, it should not be your primary focus. I also agree that more focus should be on social media. Great article!
Blogging is a tough job and Gary you just explained why. Good article. As a writer first, I will keep hoping that quality can somehow be evaluated in a positive way.
devinAs Antii and others have said above, you make some great points, but overall your position is short-sighted.
Focusing on Social Media to the total detriment of SEO is foolish, and vice-versa. You are right, but you are also wrong.
SEO is tedious and time consuming, and it pays long term dividends.
Social Media is tedious and time consuming, and it pays short term dividends.
Try this experiment:
1) Optimize a single web page for a particular keyword using basic SEO fundamentals.
2) Optimize a similar page for a similar keyword using nothing but Social Media.
3) Record each page’s traffic and SERP rankings 2, 5, and 10 years from now.
You posit that changes in Google’s algorithm can affect a site’s traffic, but what about new game-changers in the Social Media sphere? Social Media is a fickle beast (how much traffic do you get from MySpace these days?), and Facebook and Twitter will be gone in ten years, abandoned for the next big thing.
Search engines on the other hand (though they are admittedly continually evolving) are here to stay.
This is why you don’t see the big brands with the big resources wasting their time on building a huge social media presence – because it will mean nothing a few years from now.
You have to be both strategic (SEO) and tactical (Social Media) to excel in the long run.
Great post – it made me think!!!
I agree that branded websites have a higher weight then blogs, but if you blog keeping in mind that google’s blog search is only for blogs and make simple seo (titling with keywords, for instance) you could do both without adding too much to your time constraints. True?
The only thing this post shows is how inexperienced you are working in different verticals. Writing “don’t worry about SEO. Make sure your permalinks make sense, create a site map, install the appropriate plugins … and then stop worrying about it” without knowing the companies business goals, products/services, competition, or resources is like giving a business owner a detailed online marketing strategy without asking what they do.
There are so many factors involved. I would agree there are some circumstances that your article may be true for some companies, but a completely wrong strategy for others.
What about paid search and email marketing? Should we stop worrying about optimizing those too?The best article i have read here in some time i totally agree, Thanks.
Excellent article. I had the same vague feeling about the topic but now I understand better what I thought the wole time.
Thanks a lot.I write for humans not for algorithms… and though I rank #1 at the moment in the keyword I’ve been working for, I don’t expect that ranking to last… whereas the reputation I am building in LinkedIn and Facebook should last and be of greater value in the long run. Thanks for you good insights.
All the best.
Gary,
You have some good points for the power of Social Media, and the fact that we are all posting comments is a testament to that. However, overall your post is short sighted. SEO is not dead nor is it a waste of time. It sounds like you are looking for the easy road to riches.
A sensational blog post, video or some other form of social media, may burn hot for a short time, but then fades away just as quickly. And guess what, to keep people’s attention and continue to have traffic, you need to keep writing sensational blog posts. How is that less work than SEO?
Your comment about ROI on SEO interesting: “The concept of time ROI is absent from almost any discussion on SEO.” Huh? Clearly you haven’t been working with the right people if you believe this. A well done SEO plan coupled with analytics software will show you just how well or not well your SEO efforts are doing.
Google proof? What was the hot thing four years ago? Or what will be hot four years from now. Maybe social media.. maybe not.
At any rate, there is great power in social media and SEO. A better interpretation of how things are changing would be that the two fields are merging not that one is more important than the other.
Gary, with Smm you will achieve faster and cheap results, but with seo you can achieve more efficeint results and more sales. Traffic that come from social sites is with very-very low quality.
Your article contradicts itself. It shows how powerful a brand can be in SEO and how easy it is for brands to get traffic but then goes on to say how hard it is and how much work is involved in SEO.
Build a solid brand, get SEO traffic to it, and the social media traffic will come if the content is good. That way your content is shared from MULTIPLE sources instead of looking artificial coming from your obvious social media marketing tactics.
The way this thing works is people find your blog via search and share your content giving it the perfect storm of exposure that is SEO to viral content. The folks that find it via search also bookmark it and share all the cool new stuff you put out as well.
This is a bald-faced lie which anyone who has spent time trying to rank for a keyword knows.
SEO experts shouldn’t be ranking for a keyword period – that’s not good SEO. People don’t search for keywords, they search for phrases. If you (as in a general you) think that SEO simply means creating blog posts or articles focused on a keyword or a handful of keywords, you’re a) going to write stilted content and b) probably aren’t going to get too many page views.
There’s no reason for SEO content to read like robotic, stilted copy. Good SEO writers know how to seamlessly integrate keyphrases or terms while adding, as you say, “alliteration, puns, jokes and other forms of word play.” If people can tell you’re doing SEO, it ain’t good enough.
Why should we throw away SEO in favor of social media? Why can’t we do both, have the best of both worlds? I really think if you limit yourself to only one method of finding quality visitors, you could really hurt yourself. Social media alone may work for you, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it will work for everybody.
Gary you are so right on the money. SEO is important of course, but blogging and giving people content is the best way to generate traffic, trust and more. I shared your article on my site and on my linkedin profile.
Keep this good information coming. People need to know where to put their time in for the best ROE and more
My site has been up for a couple of months, I produce good content but I have a limited amount of time. I have been wondering where to put my effort and have just started a month long trial of Scribe SEO. After that I shall put in a month long effort into social media. I think some kind of split test is the only way to determine the result for yourself. I will not write for SEO, my voice is my brand.
Social Media is better when you want personal or brand authority, for ranking higher SEO is still more important in my opinion.
Christine
Intriguing article, with lots of good stuff to ponder. But I wonder if your take on SEO would be any different if your blog had more text, as opposed to being so image driven?
What a great article! You hit on some very key points that a lot of people have been missing for a while.
I wouldn’t be too concerned about Google though. I even wouldn’t be concerned about social such as Twitter and Facebook although they are the ‘up and comers’.
Consumer internet companies have ridiculous amounts of high growth AND high anti-growth in their later years. Google was nothing ten years ago. Facebook was nothing 5. The IT world has no other comparison when it comes to business — what might be practical today will be obsolete tomorrow. This is the game you play though.
Once again, great article!
The article highlights the need to include Social Media as part of your overall strategy. Ignore SEO at your peril though.
To be honest, I’ve had most success with Social Media than any other forms of marketing for my blog.
Twitter in particular has proven to provide a nice stead stream of traffic.
The re tweet feature is a fabulous method to spread ‘word-of-mouth’ marketing of your website.
It’s a matter of continuous human involvement. Reply. Converse. Advertise. Give best wishes. NO ROBOT ACTIVITY (lol).
People like people with real and inspirational stories, not show-offs or robots that force material down reader’s throats (or ears or eyes…)
You raise some good points but I do feel that your blog title should be “Why Social Media Is a Better Investment than SEO for BLOGS”.
There are a few points “with the increasing pollution of search engines with content farms…” … content farms usually do not rank very well and when they do it is short lived… you cannot mark this as a factor as this is less than 1% of quality search results.
While social media is a vital factor for any blogger, onsite-optimisation and link building will always dominate and get you ahead of the competition.
You point on brands is accurate, however the majority of sites and companies have no brand therefore the market you are talking about is few and far between. If you are a company selling a brand that belongs to someone else then yes Google should give them preference to dominate under “their” brand.. this is to enhance quality,
SEO is far more than just on-site optimisation. And SEO companies that have followed the Google guidelines from the start have never had their results “destroyed”. In the last 10 years I am yet to have a client plummet in any results.
To rely 100% on social media is foolish. Bring any site you want, use only social media and see how much traffic and conversions you get. Social Media has a much higher bounce rate than organic searches. Social media is also short lived. SEO is crucial and not all of us take hours to do SEO. I would say the majority of time wasted is on social media as having a profile on just one social media platform just does not cut it. I can however say that I can do only SEO on a site and the results, traffic and bounce rate will be much better than if I did only SMO.
Having said this I do believe that SMO is as crucial as SEO to get natural back links to enhance your organic results
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