In our “100 Days of Social Media” post, several readers wanted to know a few top reasons our site was pulling in an audience. The most basic reason: we cast a very wide net. Sites are made up of many pages beside the homepage and in the social media world, a site becomes more defined as a larger “web brand”.

In the real world, a brand can exist in conversation, on shoes, cars, napkins, and t-shirts (look at NIKE.) In the social media world, multiple points of interaction have created a huge effect on how brands are communicated. One issue is understanding how linking from outside of your site to sub-pages within it and around it (that are relevant), and to the people you are trying to reach.

One of the key reasons social media is relevant: search traffic from Google. Regardless of how many links point at any one page, eventually it will become neutral in relevancy to the keywords that drive traffic. The main 123SocialMedia.com site has roughly twenty keywords that score high results, followed by 200+ article pages that have been optimized and promoted for various search terms that attract traffic. (You can read our article on social media keyword tools to help identify some useful phrases.)

Simply put: When setting up a proper linking for search engine results, an effective strategy is to link to interior pages of the site AND outside sites that carry your brand message.

If you are initially doing this on a new site, the whole idea is to create a pyramid that builds upon the foundation you have. After a page scores for a term, it can push several weaker ones, and lend strength to a few stronger ones as well. It also means that once a visitor is on your site, that they are provided with more options for staying on your site.

Imagine this basic structure:

In the eyes of Google, you need so many relevant pages linking to any specific page in order to push it to the next level. The basic concept would be best visualized by the graphic on the left- a pagerank 2 item is surrounded by seven pagerank 1 pages. From a very generic idea: the higher the pagerank, the more likely specific terms on the page will rank for keywords in search results.

While 25 pagerank 1 pages may have enough power to create a pagerank 3 item, it is generally easier to create a well-thought structure lower ranking pages that have the ability to promote several important ones.

These basic page structure does not always align or connect with other pages, which is where relevance and freshness of the content become involved. If any one page becomes old by not having enough interesting content before earning some links from the world wide web, the content in the eyes of Google becomes stale and slowly disappears from the search results.

The complicated part of visualizing this whole concept is to realize that pagerank ranges from 1 to 10. When you understand that pagerank needs to have support from different directions to have healthy search engine result for a keyword (commonly referred to as SERPs), then the whole thing begins to resemble a complicated mess of building something out of LEGO blocks that have been pre-assembled by five year olds.

A unique problem to this project building is degradation. Old content pages may disappear from Google’s indexing, creating a foundation for your project that IS relying on a foundation that is slowly falling apart over time. Imagine the diagram on the left with ratings from 1 to 10 (and having a few disappearing sections!)

So how do you fix that?

Reason Two: Social Media Profiles and Anchor Text

The big problem is that most sites do not have too many pages that can be ranked for too many keywords, and some of those disappear over time. A standard brochure site may only have 5 to 15 pages. That means roughly 5 to 50 terms can be placed against those pages based upon the amount of textual information (relevance) on them. Once the basic pages of your site are written to be maximized for a term, you need to have X number of pages pushing them along and supporting them in the “pyramid of power.” If you need to build one of those fancy projects with high ranking in the search engines you need to make sure you have plenty of pieces to build with.

This is where ANCHOR TEXT and SOCIAL MEDIA SITES become important. Anchor text is the word that a search engine relates to a link. If I link to my site and use the words “visit my site“, then the search engine relates 123SocialMedia.com as being relevant to a search for “visit my site”

If I link to my site and use the words “social media training“, the search engines lend some of that relevance to the page I am pointing at. If I had a page that had specific relevance (aka articles or blog post) I could be more specific and get additional relevance. For instance, this post on social media training - things you should read today.

Now imagine there are a thousand social media sites out there that you can build profiles on: these could be Linkedin, Myspace, Facebook, Technorati, Digg, Stumbleupon, Jobster, Squidoo, Newsvine, or hundreds of others.

Each of these social media sites has several main benefits to your traffic strategy.

1. It can serve as a branding point for your information. Every single profile creates a possibility for brand exposure. While an active profile and community presence is more significant, having a profile merely for owning your brand presence on that site can be very helpful to prevent identity theft of your brand, to explore features and conversations on the site, and establish “secondary brand points” in search results.
2. Secondary brand points. One of the largest pitfalls of most companies and professional brands is that they rely on one point of contact- the company site (to maintain a corporate image.) In the world of the social media web, search engines and audience members may be exposed with five to ten additional sites of like-minded content. If someone Googles your brand, they may see your information and nine additional sites. If someone is on a social network- they may see various “people who liked this, also liked A, B, and C.” options. In either case, having secondary brand points allows you to dominate certain keywords and search criteria around your brand.
3. Search Engine Links. A lot of your organic search traffic comes from knowing how linking affects keywords and anchor text. Depending on the social media site (profile, community, or article) there are anywhere between 1 to 10 links that can be established on one page. Some of these links can be pointed at a target site, some of the links can be pointed at other secondary brand points, and all of them can be leveraged to push several sites.

With a grasp of how this organized chaos should be structured, imagine how your new social media world looks in a diagram:

If you take anything away from this article, take these two points:

1. DO NOT GO AROUND SPAMMING THE WEB! Provide useful information about your company and profession. If the community doesn’t make sense for you to participate in… find another community (trust me, there are plenty that are completely relevant.)
2. PERSISTENCE AND A CREATIVE MIND ARE YOUR BEST TOOLS. There are thousands of different ways that social media strategies can be implemented for business. There are no ironclad right or wrong ways of doing things, yet trying to do nothing is a guaranteed way of getting no where.
   

If you have any questions about this idea, please leave a comment. If you have a good promotional technique for using social media let us know about it.