Original post
http://www.problogger.net/archives/2010/11/08/why-social-media-is-a-better-investment-than-seo/
ProBlogger – Make Money Online ProBlogger Blog Tips
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. Sigue leyendo →
-34.500808
-58.644458
Me gusta:
Me gusta Cargando...
Los diseñadores han logrado, gracias a las diferentes técnicas de diseño, a las nuevas ideas y a la ayuda de las propiedades CSS3, impulsar, en los últimos años, los diseños de sus blogs a unos niveles que nunca antes se habían visto. Pero a pesar de esto, es cierto que el arte de los blogs personales, en muchos casos, está disminuyendo, posiblemente por la aparición de servicios como Facebook, Twitter, Posterous, Tumblr y WordPress, y servicios de porfolio como Carbonmade, Deviantart y Behance, que han hecho que personalizar el diseño de los blogs no sea tan necesario.
