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SEO Theory and the lack of social media

Posted by Michael Martinez on August 9, 2007 in General

We’ve been encouraged more than once (and in more than one way) to participate in social media. When I say “we” I mean the SEO Theory blog. In fact, several of you have submitted SEO Theory posts to various social media sites, including Sphinn.

All promotion is appreciated but it’s impossible to demonstrate SEO theory with a blog that relies on social media promotion. The whole point of this blog is to build search visibility gradually through targeted long tail optimization and to gradually accrue natural links on the basis of people’s opinions of the content.

I suppose that sounds like I’m trying to prove Google’s case about link theory for them but I’m not. Rather, I believe that the best example is an example that works. We’ve built a readership that now numbers in the thousands despite the lack of social media promotion, despite the fact that we don’t publish full feeds, and despite the fact that we haven’t gone out and created hundreds or thousands of inbound links.

If you want to know what this blog’s link profile looks like, Technorati will give you the best publicly available estimate of where people link to us from. There are plenty of other sites that link to us but I’ll admit that I’ve been using Technorati as a low-impact gauge of growth in visibility simply because it’s built into the Wordpress software.

We broke through the 60,000 mark in popularity this week. I’m not sure what that means, given Technorati’s esoteric ranking system but I will take any movement toward the top 1,000 as a sign of progress.

There are plenty of social media marketers out there, but I’m not one of them. I don’t have an account at Sphinn and I don’t know if any of my staff have accounts there. I have not asked people to DIGG SEO theory articles or to share them elsewhere. I’m just letting it all happen according to the whims and desires of our readership.

I think social media marketing has its place but it really is not a “must do” function in search engine optimization. So despite some recent suggestions to the contrary I’m not link baiting, I’m not looking for tons of traffic and page views, and I’m not looking for one-time visitors. SEO theory is supposed to be something like the “insiders’ blog” you don’t want to share with your friends.

In other words, I appreciate all the third-party promotion and will continue to appreciate it, but this blog is all about creating visibility for Web sites that other people don’t want to promote. Of course, in a way, that really means taking an uninteresting Web site and turning it into something that other people do want to promote.

I’ve often said you’ll get value in return for value. I don’t often link out of the SEO theory articles to other sites, and when I do I do so because I feel someone has made an interesting point (even if I have something else in mind from their own intentions).

In a lot of ways, I am doing what Google thinks every Webmaster wants to do: using my links to guide my visitors to good content. As someone who has edited a popular niche directory, I know that most Webmasters don’t actually do that. But the quality of a Web site can indeed be measured by the selectivity of its outbound links. Social media sites provide value because their communities (even when manipulated by black hat teams) choose which outbound links are the most important.

But that really has nothing to do with search engine optimization. Hence, this blog won’t depend upon or look for social media support. Someone should start a Social Media Optimization Theory blog. I suspect there is a huge hungry audience waiting for a serious assessment of that topic.