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Social Media has becoming the hottest thing in the SEO community of late. It has overtaken many of the old traditional methods of link building and targeted traffic for a particular niche. We will be delving into greater detail in future entries about each particular social media website and marketing methods, the pros and cons of each, and how to properly utilize them to help increase your search engine rankings.

To understand social media marketing one should first look at a general history from whence it was spawned. In the recent past search engine optimization consisted of webmasters exchanging links with one another. This was done to provide both traffic and link popularity for both webmasters involved in the exchange. Google and other search engines quickly learned that random linking between unrelated sites for the sole purpose of increasing one’s link popularity was not a good way to judge the importance of a website.
This is where one way linking rises in importance. In the past the best source of one way links was from directories that would link to your website. It was great! You could control your anchor text and be listed amongst other relevant verbiage on the linking website. Again it didn’t take long for the big G and it’s wanna be friends to devalue these one way directory links. What was a webmaster to do? Enter blogging! The beginning of social media was born through the advent of blogging. With a blog a webmaster was able to not only gain one way relevant links form his blog to his websites, but he/she was also able to build up a “social” following. These users benefited by gaining content that they could share with their own users as well as linking back to the original poster benefiting his website with traffic and one way links. It didn’t take long for savvy webmasters to begin to ruin the value of this revolutionary new platform. The game was simple. Comment on the related blog linking back to your site. Sure you added absolutely no value whatsoever in most cases to the original blog post, but you got free one way links that you had complete control over back to your sites! The world was great again until the nofollow attribute came into being. The nofollow attribute made it so that any link going out with the nofollow tag attached to it passed absolutely no redeeming link juice to the outgoing link. This didn’t make those eager beaver webmasters happy and so the search for easy one way links continued.

What was the next big thing for our webmaster to destroy through gaming of systems and greed? BOOKMARKING! Yes sites popped left and right providing webmasters with a source to list their favorite bookmarks (back links). All was great until this source of juicy back link was devalued as well at the hands of said abusers of systems.

Enter Social Media Websites

Social media websites are places where webmasters can submit their links, pictures, articles, videos, audio, or any other media sources. In most cases these submissions are then able to be made “popular” by community participation. The more votes you get the fastest the more popular your submission becomes and therefore the more eyeballs it will get on it.
This is the simple explanation of what a social media website is all about. In fact social media marketing has become an entire industry unto itself. The savvy webmaster has to play a lovely tightrope walking game.