Economic Development: Link & Social Media Strategy

Need a plan?You’ve spent considerable effort and money on your

websites and now you’re caught up in the Social Media craze with accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and not to mention your blogs.

Are you using them to compliment each other?

Page Competition

26 Million

1 Billion1 Trillion

1998

2000

2008

Source : “We knew the web was big” by Google, 2008http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.htmlGraphics from Webmarketing 123.

Google Pages

Hard Fact

Source: “iProspect Blended Search Results Study” by JupiterResearch, 2008, http://www.iprospect.com/about/researchstudy_2008_blendedsearchresults.htm

Graphics from Webmarketing 123.

The pages searchers click on

Why do Links matter?

Links are Internet currency

Position Matters

Search Result Percent of all Clicks#1 42%#2 12%#3 8.5%

The percent of clicks continues to drop

Source: leaked AOL data

Types of Links

Inbound or One-way – These are the best

Outbound – Helping visitors find relevant information

Reciprocal – Possible to do more harm than good

Key Factors for Inbound Links

#1 – Quality of the inbound link#2 – Relevance to the content on the inbound link#3 – Anchor keywords on the inbound link page#4 – Title keywords on the inbound link page#5 – Number of links (quantity)

What do people Link to?

Content – relevant, trust, interesting or evokes an emotion (for or against)

People or Organizations they know People or Organizations they like

Link Sources Bookmarking – Furl, De.licio.us., StumbleUpon Blog Comments Article Marketing Press Release Marketing Contextual Blog Posts Videos – YouTube, Viddler Directories Social Media – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn

Social Media Marketing

Major social media sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter don’t provide a benefit in terms of search engine results. But these outlets can be a tremendous source for driving traffic to your website and should not be ignored.

Social Media with Link Value

LinkedIn Digg Technorati MyBlogLog Kirtsy Propeller CoRank

Social Media Outlets

Social Media – Your next taskIf the website supports foreign languages, you travel internationally for business recruitment or the organization has an international office you might want to consider internationalizing your social media efforts.

Social Media: What the World Uses

Social Media: The Big 3

Sources: chart http://www.vincos.it/world-map-of-social-networksData based on Alexa & Google Trends for Website results:

A Few Linking Do’s and Don’ts All links should not go directly to your homepage Link to specific pages on your site (relevancy from

inbound page) Quality over Quantity Don’t ignore .gov and .edu links Check for do-follow or no-follow tags for Social

Media sites Don’t be afraid to terminate or revive a link

Linking & Media Summary

Content is still KING !!Never ever buy a link for page rank !Building and implementing a Linking strategy takes time.Page rank of the site Linking to affects your rank.Website and Social Media efforts should work together

to create greater value.Use social media to position yourself internationally.