Is Social Promotion Easier Than SEO?

[rowanman28]

I've had my site for about three months now, and I was just starting to climb up the first page of a Google search on social promotion, then today I noticed it dropped down to the top of the second page.

Social promotion is not a high competition keyword, and even if I got to the top of the first page, I could only expect ten thousand searches a month at most.

I've been getting most of my traffic from Twitter, about two hundred unique views a day, about 3,000 unique views in total.

I get my Twitter followers from Twiends, unfollow people who aren't following back with Tweepi, and I schedule tweets using Twaitter.

I've tried SEO, made heaps of back links, but the only thing I can tell that works is publishing regular blog posts.

I guess my question is, should I focus on SEO, even though the only thing I know works is writing blog posts, or should I concentrate on getting more Twitter followers, or both?

Can you make any suggestions on how I can get more free or cheap traffic? Is social promotion easier than SEO, and more effective, or am I missing something important?

[kiwiviktor81]

I'm just getting started but it seems from my limited experience that social marketing is a great tool if you have a high profile. If you don't have a huge number of followers/friends then I think SEO is better for getting a website started.

I have observed on StumbleUpon that people with 4,000 reviews and favourites but no followers can still send a couple of hundred views a day to anything that they discover.

[ichl13]

What does social promotion involve? How do you get your followers in the first place?

[saladflorida]

i think that you should working on both SEO and the social promotion, as they will support each other.
On the SEO side, beside writing the blogpost, you can also build backlink to your site from authority site. Working on your on-page SEO woul help also.

[rowanman28]

Can anyone give an example of how you get a real authority link? I don't trust back linking much, but I'm sure Google still places some importance on the right type of links. I've gotten hundreds of thousands of views from StumbleUpon as well. I've been writing everyday for two years, and even with all of those pages, I'm starting to get more traffic from social sites than Google. I used to write articles on other people's sites, and the content farm thing didn't help that at all.

[paulgl]

Social promotion is a great way for targeted traffic, lousy for SEO.
But that's good! People should spend more time getting targeted
traffic, on their own! I use twitter to the max, and certainly
find facebook fan pages, in niches, that don't moderate too hard.

It can also lead to a little linkbait, which may in turn help SEO.

Authority link? If you had been building authority sites, you would
have them at the ready. Authority, is all about content, and lots
of it. The bigger and better your site becomes, the more authority
it has.

Want an easy authority link? Toss it in a sig here. Contrary to
popular belief, WF sig links are golden. Niche does not matter.
These forums are crawled and indexed within seconds.

People misunderstand how "authority" works. I remember a joke
going around a while back, where Matt Cutts had mentioned
viagra or something, then had that post ranking for viagra.
I never confirmed the story, but it is a great way that authority
passes.

Much the same way wikipedia can rank pages that have PR n/a
and no backlinks. Same with amazon.

So, start building your own authority empire. Complete with linking
from your own blogs, squidoo, forums, etc.

It's not as hard as it seems.

Paul

[saladflorida]

you can buy link/place an ads on BIG site, say like this warrior forum. Or if you have design related website you can buy a banner on link on mashable.com for example.
backlink is not as good as it was before.

[Sunfyre7896]

In my opinion, yes it is. I've been working on seo with link building using the proper anchor text for awhile now. Yes, I have ranked number one for some of the keywords that aren't in a competitive area, but the ones that are competitive and have millions of links and thousands of searches per month are eluding me.

I think that utilizing Facebook, Twitter, Social sites like Digg, etc., as well as YouTube are your best bet to gain traffic. Just my opinion and experience though.

[jackdonovan]

Originally Posted by saladflorida

you can buy link/place an ads on BIG site, say like this warrior forum. Or if you have design related website you can buy a banner on link on mashable.com for example.
backlink is not as good as it was before.

I agree, but be careful with buying link. In my experience, many of them are low quality site, the seller just build the site for link sale...

[stephencammeron]

Originally Posted by paulgl

Authority link? If you had been building authority sites, you would
have them at the ready. Authority, is all about content, and lots
of it. The bigger and better your site becomes, the more authority
it has.

Oh, really? and so, content farming really is a good start then?

[JamesGw]

Maybe if you're sociable. I'm not. I hate social networks and marketing, honestly.

SEO makes much more sense to me.

[transcriptionservices]

Knowledge in a wide range of SEO techniques to address research needs of companies in various industries. The most recent example is Social Bookmarking. Websites like Del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, and allow users to share their personal favorites (bookmarks) with others. Users tag each bookmarked site with the keywords they deem most appropriate.