Social Media and Search Engine Ranking

[Kristijntje]

Social media marketing is becoming more of an accepted part of the online marketing mix because of its ability to drive website traffic and inbound links to sites. Techniques like link baiting, Digg-baiting, and submitting sites to bookmarking or social voting services like Del.icio.us, Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit have been known to achieve both short and long term value to the sites targeted by such campaigns.

Sometimes however, the short term effects can outweigh the long term effects, and if a social media campaign does not end up with a lot of external links which help with search engine rankings, the end result can be criticism. Complaints about social media marketing such as “none of the links point to the homepage”, “the traffic is worthless”, or “it’s just the flavor of the month” are tremendously overshadowed and cast aside by some new developments in the major search engines...

full article: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/socia...king/5576/