W3 Group’s David Wright quoted in GigCoin on Social Media and SEO

Optimizing Social Media Content for Search Engines: What Works Best? That’s the title of an article that came out on GigCoin today.

The article looks in particular at 5 social media sites and their impact on SEO: Flickr, YouTube, Digg, StumbleUpon, and Tumblr. Others are addressed as well, and there are some useful tips from several experts on how to use social media for SEO benefit.

Here are a couple of excerpts:

…most links from YouTube videos are “nofollow” links, so they don’t help so much in Google, Yahoo! or Bing. Many of the smaller search engines ignore the “nofollow” tag to a link, so links from YouTube do help with SEO for those search engines.  That said, it is definitely worth putting a link in the first line of your video description, elsewhere in the description, and on your channel page.  The reason to put a link on the first line of the video description is that when people watch a video, only the first line or two of the description is shown by default.  Put a link there, and viewers will be more likely to click on it and visit your site.  If it’s not visible unless you expand the description, far fewer viewers will see it and you’ll get less traffic from it.

Digg, Stumbleupon, and other social bookmarking sites are a quick, easy way to build links to a website. This is also a “trick” to avoid having to pay fees to submit a site to the search engines.  Search engine submission is an old-school way to get your site into the search engines, and can still be helpful, but these days building a few links to the site by using Digg, Stumbleupon and others tells the search engines the page exists, and when the spiders crawl the links to that page, they’ll see the other pages of your site as well.  Some search engines charged a fee to submit a site, others didn’t.  I don’t know whether any still do or not but if so, there’s no point to paying them when you can easily build a few links and let the search engine spiders will do the rest.”

Happy reading and we hope this is useful for your marketing strategy!  Please share and comment on what works for you or what doesn’t.