Social Media Marketing for SEO: What Not To Do!

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is the use of social networking web sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and others in order to increase brand awareness, linking, and traffic to your web site. As time would have it, regardless of whether it is online or offline people still respond best to referral marketing.

How SMM & SEO Work Together

When paired together, SEO and SMM, can be a lethal combination. SEO can bring about brand awareness and allow those who were previously unfamiliar with your business to become more open to the idea as higher rankings are also associated with better service. You also benefit with increases in traffic. Now, how is it that the combination of social media marketing and search engine optimization are lethal? Well, when someone suggests something new to several others, it generates BUZZ! The more people that refer others to the site the more the site’s popularity grows. Bookmarking has become an SMM channel with sites like de.li.cious, stumbleupon, and digg generating tons of views from visitors that typically would be unaware of the web site, as they don’t locate the site because of a search, but because of a referral trend.

Couple people’s natural ability to seek out the things they need with our tendency to consider a referral a more quality source for what we need and you’ve got what I said before, “a lethal combination!”

Killer Combo Meets Disaster

So many already knew that SEO was a great way to build awareness, increase traffic, and ROI. Now you also know that combining natural search with a quality social media marketing campaign can result in even more awareness, traffic and ROI. Now many will dive right in and start a MySpace page for their business or some other well known social networking profile and that’s great…however don’t be fooled by “black hat” methods of SMM.

What’s that you ask? Just like there is a dark-side to SEO, there is a dark-side to SMM.

“Black Hat” SEO - is the use of unethical tactics, such as Link Farms, Redirects, Cloaking and other techniques to rank well in search engines for competitive terms.

Though you may rank well for a small amount of time, Google will catch you!!! Matt Cutts (Google Engineer) has discussed this several times on his blog and every quality search engine optimization consultant or analyst will tell you the same. Adhere to the best practices and you will prevail.

So, just like black hat SEO, we have black hat SMM. This term is for those who abuse their ability to use social media marketing by using automation tools to create accounts, to “friend blast” and submit spammy content to social media syndication sites.

Example: MySpace Friend Blaster PRO…

This tool is used to automate adding of friends, comments, and more. Several unsavory marketers will use a tool like this to build backlinks via MySpace Profile Pages, as well as generate visibility via the network and hoping for trickle through traffic.

Adding profiles under fake names to increase the ranking of your content socially in web sites like digg are also “black hat” SMM methods.

Easy Black Hat Avoidance

If you want your online presence to stay untarnished and rank well in Google as well as generate a constantly growing stream of traffic here are my suggestions:

1. Stay away from automation. If you can’t do it yourself or designate someone from your company then it’s probably not worth doing.

2. Bookmark and generate content that you would find useful and that can be useful to others, not just ad based resources.

3. Utilize social media marketing to grow relationships with your contacts. This will give you returning users/buyers rather than just one time passer-byers who just increase your bounce rate and taint your metrics.

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