We all have heard about the great ‘G’, but the question arises

-is it actually that Great?
-do we actually need to depend upon Google for our businesses?
-What next after Google?
-……

We all would have participated in one or the other discussion on similar questions but did we find any answer?

What will happen if one fine day you wake up only to find that G crashed or some major update happened (which is getting very regular phenomenon these days), and as a result all your current rankings are gone and hence the traffic, leads and conversions. What next?

The solution to this is “Social Media”, which is getting increasingly popular these days due to its high visibility (more than SE’s) and capability to pull the targeted visitors to your website just like the search engines. But unlike SE’s, every Social Media website generally concentrates more on a specific theme (or so to say a community) rather than giving equal importance to all different themes. As an example, Sphinn.com caters to SEO community. So it is very important that you select the right SMO website(s) for maximum visibility and quality traffic for your website. Though you can still use other Social Media sites for added visibility or brand building, your target should not be traffic from those websites.

I will be discussing in detail about different Social Media website and the community/theme they target in my coming posts.

One often wonders about the usefulness of blogs in driving up the page ranks. Many of them have a ‘no follow’ tag attached to them, keeping all search engines at bay. However, the usefulness of a blog lies in its highly relevant and contextual content. The content is generally so contextual that it attracts incoming links at a rapid rate. Let us look into how exactly a blog can be useful in contextual linking

• Good Content
  The blog world works entirely on the premise of good content. If a blogger comes across good content, he will immediately link his blog to your site/page. There are many blogs which discourage search engines and there are many that aren’t. It is therefore worthwhile to invest in working to get blog reviews and have blogs of your own product or service. Links are easily shared between bloggers and in no time your site could have numerous highly contextual back links

• Regular Updates
  Blogs also get regularly updated, more often on a daily basis. The search engines tend to like regularly updated content and rank such pages higher. You might be wondering that if content gets refreshed regularly, content and back links to your site might soon end up in the archives. However, bloggers have an effective tool known as a permalink which allows them to permanently link to regularly read blogs and pages. So, an effective blog (read good quality content) is a sure shot way to receiving a permalink

• Anchor Text
  The anchor text for the link provided is also generally highly contextual in nature and related to the theme of your website. Adding a blog component to your site is also an effective way to get quality backlinks.Generally, bloggers, as blogging etiquette, would provide links to both your home page and to the blog page as well. You therefore gain two highly relevant links from each blog that links to you.

• Social Book Marking
  Blogs are closely related to Social book marking and tagging sites as well. Sites like Del.ico.us and Stumble Upon can greatly drive traffic to your site. These sites allow you to maintain bookmarks online and make bookmarked sites available to other users as well. Again there is one advantage in ‘Stumble Upon’ which can avail full use of. The advantage is in the form of paid bookmarks. You can pay for a listing on Stumble Upon. Stumble Upon includes your web page/web site in the random sample that they generate and allow you to run a campaign. The important thing to note here is that even after the paid campaign is over, the stumbles you receive on your site/page still carry the same weight.

As web2.0 evolves the importance of blog, forums and communities will only increase. As such search engines will also evolve to include blogs/forums and communities in their listings. Google has already come out with a patent to include blogs and articles in its SERP listings that have been endorsed by members within the same network. As such user reviews would drive such articles to high page ranks. This effectively translates into “Content is King”.