Hi all, I've just got a quick question about generating backlinks for my websites. Although I've been reliably informed that one of the best routes for creating quality backlinks is through article submission to popular directories such as ezinearticles, I've also heard people commenting that linking from social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter can help. I suppose my real question is how much weight is there behind social networking backlinks. Would creating a Facebook group for my particular website and linking to it help, for example? Likewise would tweeting the address of said site make much difference? Any opinions or advice would be greatly appreciated. Bex
They can help with your traffic but not (directly) with your rankings. The only linking benefit (for ranking purposes) you'd get is if someone saw your link on the social network/site, followed it, and then decided they liked the site enough to link to it. If you want some REAL link building advice, check out "Link Building Articles" in my forum signature. (It leads to another thread here on the forums.)
no its not much of any use because google dosent give much weight to social networking sites but you can definitely get some free taffic
They're not, and that's the point. They can drive traffic to your site, but most of that traffic will likely be one-off. (Meaning they'll come, look around, and leave, never to return.)
The biggest problem of social networking is that it is such a time consuming thing, and time is important for most of the webmasters!
social media or social bookmarking is just a perfect way to bring traffic towards ur website ... i mean u can never get a strong back link from there u can just convert ur followers or fans into visitors and thats it
It always depends with the people, example in Twitter, a lot of people says that Tweeting is very effective but its a case to case basis... If those members loves your Tweeted sites or etc, then they will link to it but if they dont then that's a problem.
Any and every link is good for SEO. A link is good because it has the ability to lead someone to your website and if you've done your job right then you'll have no problem getting your visitors to invest in whatever you are offering.
Social media sites are useful for increasing the traffic of your website , you can make new visitors from social media like face book , my space and twitter etc. but can't for particular keywords , for this you can use your blogs links and paste them in the msgs . it will help for your website and your blogs also .
Sure, but it's about best managing your time. Some links are more valuable then others, and when it comes to social bookmarking, they are on the low end of the scale.
So the general consensus seems to be that while social networking is advantageous in that it could bring some traffic to your website, it's not actually going to increase the ranking of your site in itself. I guess that makes it something that's great to do if you've got a spare couple of hours to dedicate to it, but that there are other avenues of creating decent backlinks that would be better to invest the time into first. I'd love to hear if anyone has had specific success through using these sites though.
Dan Schulz nailed it. Twitter in particular will get you lots of visits (and increase your bounce rate considerably) but occasionally you will elicit a genuine follower/linker as a result.
That begs another question (apologies if these are very basic, I'm quite new to the area of traffic generation myself); will a higher bounce rate negatively affect your page ranking in any way? By that I mean will Google or any of the other search engines be likely to dismiss your site if most of your page views bounce?
Think about what you are asking. Do Google have access to your bounce rate? Erm... no! (Unless they have spies in all datacenters on the globe, which may be the case in the future but not quite yet.) Unless you are using their stats packages or AdSense they would not normally know the bounce rate of your pages. On that note, AdSense is a major data gathering mechanism for them - the promise of a few pennies for the webmaster gives them a wealth of information about internet demographics.
By the time you decide that the link is on the "low end of the scale" you could have already just posted your link and taken the charity... Managing time may have something to do with it, but that's not what's in question from the OP here. Actually, you're the first one to bring that up...? The point is that a link from a social site does in fact have value.
Social Networking Backlinks from social network profiles, bookmarks, etc are intended to build popularity for your website brand and not necessarily to rank in the SERP's. In fact, they can hurt you in the SERP's if used improperly. Although you can bring in some traffic with an effective Social Media Marketing Campaign, they typically will not generate more traffic good ol' fashioned search engine rankings for high volume keywords + a targeted Adwords campaign....unless your site has something really sensational to offer or has a unique twist to it that causes it to go "viral" amongst the social networks. That's the most thorough answer I can give.
Using social networking sites to get traffic is one good SEO technique. But you must keep in mind not to spam or make violations using it.
My best tips to you is to focus on building links from good and relevant neighborhoods. If you are working with Social Bookmarking and blog commenting you need to focus on targeting the right pages with the right keywords and topics. This will really help you build a stronger impression. Focus on dofollow sites - but also keep in mind that links on relevant pages also gives you visitors from the links and not only spider visits. Also, this article "Importance of Keyword Research" is extremely valuable when you are trying to improve your SERP rankings!