It’s understandable that some business owners, whether SME or mid-size, may simply prefer to consolidate most of their multichannel e-marketing into more traditional online campaigns. This is despite the rapid evolution of social media networking, which has influenced Google and added to the 200 plus ways its algorithm indexes for site authority.
The simple truth is that for business to deploy social engagement within an integrated e-commerce strategy requires a long term vision. Site owners tend to want to see immediate, tangible traffic results and the implementation of pay per click campaigns and search engine optimisation can produce the desired ROI, as measured in clicks, page hits and conversion ratios.
The importance of quality backlinks can never be underestimated in the building and maintaining of a trusted web presence and is one of the most important of search engine optimisation factors influencing both human visitors and search engine ranking. While personalised bespoke web solutions are critical to the onsite journey, it is the creation and circulation of relevant content that is a key driver to delivering powerful backlink activity, integral to a brand’s visible social value.
Links should be made from a variety of sources and related industries, as well as appropriate random links, and not just from an immediate business sector. It should be remembered that there are also different qualities of links and levels of relevancy which are scored as either more or less valuable. Not all content directories, for example, are quality ranked themselves by Google or highly rated by Alexa, and were adversely affected by last year's Google Panda algorithm downgrading ‘thin content’ link farm sites.
Much of the problem stems from years of unscrupulous scammers preying on site owners by offering budget driven instant results. Established ecommerce sites understand that the processes of successful organic online marketing and optimised link strategies are never the same as instant PPC advertising.
Google has been in constant battle with blackhat tactics, which would gain a peak in the rankings using keywords unrelated to content. While a brief spike in click traffic might be the overnight result, the longer term result will be damaging in the longer term when rankings, inevitably, drop and visitor numbers fall away.
Undoubtedly, there is always going to be some degree of ‘grey’ overlap between black and white hat activity to gain the hard fought for rankings – and some legitimate sites have briefly fallen victim to Google Panda. But there are key differences between genuine content sites and the spam link merchants.
A brand’s social activity is now considered highly important to underpinning site credibility as increasingly, search is conducted via social sites and away from search engines. Optimisation of content is therefore, still crucial, in whatever genuine context it is to be used.
It is therefore, still vital to include backlinks within key content, being second only in importance to implementing search engine optimisation for securing long term results. Incredibly, in the age of optimising for social media, there are still an enormous number of websites where keyword optimisation has not been carried out whatsoever.