Social Marketing and SEO Results

Social Marketing and SEO Results

I was reading Timothy Brocklehurst's Blog yesterday,
and the discussion of his SEO results motivated me to
go and have a fresh look at my own traffic stats. What
I found was quite a pleasant surprise.

This blog had gotten to the top of Google for some fairly
competitive keywords. One of these is online income blog.

This is probably the least competitive of the keywords
that I was getting Google and Yahoo! traffic from, but
the only one unaffected by what happened next...

Just a few hours later, Blogger locked down my blog as a
possible Spam Blog. Huh?! Boy was I confused.

This had happened to one of my other blogs a little
while ago, and took quite a while to get unlocked.
Fortunately it took just a couple of hours this time.
Mostly because I found a post in the Blogger Forum
that allowed for a much faster review.

Unfortunately the results on several of the keywords
that I had ranked high on before...

just... plain... disappeared.

So there it is. The two edged sword. We enjoy a bit of
an edge using Google's own Blogger and get favorable
treatment by their spiders, but with an interruption of
our status, that advantage disappears mighty fast.

This got me to thinking about what it was that got me
ranked for these keywords in the first place.

The flat honest fact of the matter is that I had been doing
the basics of SEO work all along, but what had really
pushed my results over the edge had nothing to do with
meta tags, keyword density or pagerank.

What had finally pushed me up there in the rankings was:

Social Marketing!

How do I know this?

Elimination.

I got no results like this when my PageRank was
higher, and no Google traffic at all when I used
various submission services, or the SEO service(s)
duJour.

The plain fact of the matter is that traffic begets
traffic begets traffic... And so on.

The more hits I get from my Social Marketing activities,
the more I get from Google, Yahoo!, MSN and the rest
of the SE crowd.

That is also the good news. It means that I'll rebound
quickly from my own Google slap. All I need to do is
keep at what I am already doing.

Social Bookmarking.

MicroBlogging.

Squidoo

Posting to forums and blogs.

What got me where we all want to be was Social
Marketing or Web 2.0 if you prefer, and that is
how it should be.

What works, and will continue to work for the
forseeable future is to be involved in your market.
So you'll see me out ther swinging in my own
"Semi-Literate Marketing Thug" way.

It ain't slick, and often it ain't pretty, but it will be me...

Interacting in the niches I choose to market to,
and making mistakes along with a few fungolas
along the way...

Floyd Bogart