great video about what Social Media means for the future of SEO:

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I get a lot of questions about keyword rankings and traffic.  People wondering why their traffic has gone up but their keyword rankings have not, or the reverse: keyword rankings have increased dramatically with only a few more hits in a month.  So I thought that I would take a few moments here and discuss the two methods of tracking SEO success and which ones as a real estate agent you should be looking at.

To start, keyword ranking is your webpage’s position in a search engine when someone types in the appropriate keywords.  How you rank depends on a wide range of factors like how much competition is there for that keyword, how long have other sites been around, and what actions they are taking to rank.  In theory, the higher your keyword ranks the more traffic will come to your site because searchers will find your site before they find the others.

Traffic relates to how many visitors you have to your site.  Traffic can be analyzed in a wide range of different ways.  The primary way to break down traffic is by direct, referral, PPC, and organic.  Direct traffic means that a user typed your url rsgray.com into the address bar and came to your site.  Referral traffic means they followed a link somewhere to your site.  This means they could have followed a link on a review in yelp!, or a blog in Linkedin.  PPC [Pay-per-click] is traffic that came to you from an adwords campaign. These are the sponsored links you pay Google for.  And finally organic traffic is traffic that comes to your site through a search engine.  It is organic, not forced or paid for.  If someone types in “nintendo generation” and then clicks on my website, that would be organic traffic.  Strictly speaking most SEO companies look exclusively at that organic traffic because that is what is coming from those search engines they focus on.  Lately, as more SEO companies get their clients involved with blogs, article submission sites, youtube videos, and of course social media, we are looking more at that referral and direct traffic.  If you can create a really good piece of link bait (quality article about staging a home, a youtube video about repainting a home to sell it, podcasts on filling out paperwork, etc.) you will see leads coming to your site from this link bait referral.  As well, if you can get your url stuck in someone’s head so that they bypass Google all together and come to your site by directly typing your website into their browser, that would increase your Direct Traffic stats.

Let’s get back to those keyword rankings for a second before we talk about which one is more important.  The number one ranked keyword is going to receive the lion’s share of the traffic coming to that Search Engine Results Page. So the reason you want to be listed in the number keyword ranking spot is to capture that majority of the traffic.

So let’s get back to the question, as a real estate agent which should you be focused on, keyword rankings or traffic?  The quick answer is both.  If you can increase your rankings you’re going to see more traffic.  But remember increased rankings bring more traffic, so if your traffic is increasing regardless of what happens to your keywords you’re still meeting your primary goal.  Moving those keywords up is going to cause a significant increase in traffic, but any increase in traffic is still the primary goal and should be nurtured and analyzed so you can increase it whether it’s organic, referral, or direct traffic.

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Great article posted by randfish

When I first started in SEO, link acquisition was almost always a manual process. I’d search the engines for links that pointed to the competition, find relevant directories and link lists, email relevant sites and beg, borrow or bribe (aka buy advertising) to get a link. I tried reciprocal link building (and did some pretty dumb stuff). Then, as I got more intertwined in the SEO community, I found vendors who built large networks of sites, spammed blogs/forums/guestbooks and ran text link sales operations. I leveraged these services to help clients rank better, almost always with great success. Then I met Matt Cutts, found out more about Google’s webspam team, saw penalties and their impact (remember Florida?) and even found some sites we worked on in the Sandbox.

Over time, I got smarter. I read papers about Hilltop, Trustrank, Anti-Trustrank and many more. I saw sites escaping the sandbox once they’d earned greater quantities of trusted links. I started understanding that Google’s search quality team was only going to get better at recognizing and counting legitimate links (and tossing out the junk), so I focused exclusively on more “white hat” kinds of links. That’s when I discovered linkbaiting and the power of Digg, Reddit & StumbleUpon to drive traffic that would naturally link. We had success with quizzes (and after Matt left SEOmoz, he had a little too much success) and viral content that earned thousands of links overnight and started offering it as a service.

As our clientele and foci changed, we changed again. Linkbait gave way to broader viral marketing efforts.Social media marketing arose as a practical and high quality way to earn links. Our clients became larger brands and organizations and one-off link projects weren’t scalable, so we consulted on tactics like content and technology licensing, training editorial staff to earn links & participate in the social media world themselves, and incentivizing user-generated content, which in turn brought links from those users. We found ways to drive natural links to deep pages on huge sites targeting the long tail, how to combine embeddable content and user-adopted brand affinity to drive link growth. And we stopped buying links entirely.

I figured a visual history might make for a compelling view:

Now, link building is changing again. I’m of the distinct impression that the engines (nowadays referring toBing & Google, since the others are all but out of the picture) are evolving to keep up with the web’s breakneck speed and new forms of data, along with new ways of analyzing links, are making themselves felt in the SERPs. My guesses/observations would include:

• Twitter really is cannibalizing the web’s link graph, or at least, the blogosphere’s and Google seems to be using Tweet counts in some way (though possibly only in the QDF algo).
• The acceleration rate of link acquisition and the freshness of new links is having a more dramatic impact than before, and the “old crusty links” paradigm may be fading a bit.
• Brand mentions and keyword associations with brand names are influencing the rankings more and more.
• Un-trustworhty link patterns are conferring more filters and penalties than ever before.
• QDD is as strong as ever, and vertical results are more prominent than at any time in the engines’ histories.
• Google and Microsoft both know more about traffic and surfing habits than ever before, and this data is likely being used to, at the least, quality control for potential algorithmic misses.
• Ad blindness is worse than ever (16% of Internet users are responsible for 85% of all ad clicks on the web), forcing the engines to make ads more relevant and more obvious to continue earning revenue.
• Paid inclusion is going away, and talk of potentially paying sites to be in the indices (the reverse model) is in the air (or maybe not).
• Billions of non-linked “references” flow out across the web through social media messages, emails, tweets and IMs. Someone, at some search engine, is undoubetdly mining this data to see how they can derive value and relevancy from it.

As marketers, we have to evolve or be left behind by those who can better adapt. It’s hard to see the forest for the trees right now, but I think we’re closing in on a time when real-time, social and traditional web references are all a part of the rankings equation. The future may be less about links and more about brand building and brand participation. I don’t want to be the most-linked-to site in my niche; I want to be the site that’s synonymous with my niche.

Now we just have to figure out the tactics…

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