6 Comments

Social posting describes the act of posting links to your content on social websites. Social posting includes social bookmarking sites like Delicious and Stumbleupon (see The Conversation – Lesson 8), social news sites like Digg, Reddit and Fark and social link sharing sites of which there are hundreds.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the act of creating, modifying and proliferating content to increase your website or blogs profile when ranked in directories by search engine “robots” (see The Conversation – Lesson 16). Social posting is one way content can be optimized, and social posting optimizes when you (1) post content and create links to other content and (2) tag your content enabling search engines to pull your content up in searches that use certain keywords and key phrases.

Linking
Many social websites enable you to include a link back to your content. Links to your content from locations outside of your content are called External Links. There is some debate, but many professional SEO’s believe that external links are the most powerful source of ranking power. The more the better. The reason SEO’s believe so much weight is given to this metric is that it is the hardest thing to fake – people either link to you because they like your content or they don’t. External links provide relevancy clues that are important for search engines to do a good job ranking you. Based on this information, it would make sense to create as many external links as you can via social posting. Before you spend your time doing this, it is important to know that many of the social posting sites use a certain computer code (HTML) which causes links from their sites not to add ranking “points.” These links have the attribute referred to as “no follow” and are used to prevent spammers from using the social posting sites platform to drive spammy traffic.

If you are going to spend your time using social websites to create useful external links to your content, be sure the websites you spend time in the hope of gaining external links are on social sites that have a “do follow” attribute.

Tagging
Social websites do provide optimization value by enabling you to create tags to your content. Keywords and phrases that people search for to find the services and products you offer become “tags” when you input them in a special box within a blog management system or when you post on a social website. Bots read your content and use the tags you create to index the content in their directories so people searching for particular words or phrases can find what they’re looking for easier. If you write a blog on dry eye syndrome, you “tag” it with words that are in the content you post like “dry, eye, syndrome, eyedrops, etc…” Entering the correct tags make it more likely your content will be found in a search for “dry eye” etc… While you can’t always get the links you want from social websites, you are likely to get the tags you want, which in turn optimizes your content in search.

Find more information on search engine optimization, including a discussion forum on my Facebook page “OnToptics.”

- Alan N. Glazier, OD, FAAO
Founder/CEO
Shady Grove Eye and Vision Care
Rockville, MD

Twitter Handle: @EyeInfo
Blog: eyeinfo.wordpress.com
Website: YourEyeSite.com

Copyright Dr. Alan Glazier 2010 – All Rights Reserved