To Rank Well, Attract Buzz: Natural Links, +1s, Likes, Follows, Shares…

Maile Ohye has put out another Google Webmaster Help video talking about what advice she would give to startups in the first 10 minutes.

Around 8:20 in the video, she mentions how valuable social media is to find a potential audience for your site and increase query volumes.

Maile and Matt Cutts have for years talked about how valuable social media marketing is for your website, but what was written on Maile’s slide was very direct and powerful:

‘To rank well, provide an awesome product or service, then attract buzz: natural links, +1s, likes, follows, shares…‘ 

Maile then follows to say that she is often asked about whether to dedicate time to social media marketing, to which she says that she ‘thinks social media is Terrific!’

Maile made a similar statement in her previous video as well, which you can read more about on our Testing Social Signals in Search post.

You should watch the full video below, but note that I would say it is more for SEO beginners than just startups, as I have seen many large companies and small businesses making these same mistakes.

A couple points I would like to mention:

1) I cannot agree more about making sure you are set up in Google Webmasters and have your email set to forward to you.

One of my hobby sites Weird Asia News was recently hacked pretty bad, as the hack would only redirect a very small number of users and only from time to time, thus avoiding detection for months. I woke up one morning to a number of emails from Google that my site was compromised and the following day my site was showing the big red Malware warning page = NOT GOOD!

Through working with Google Webmasters and their support forums, I was able to identify the hack, clean it up, and get the malware warning removed in under 24 hours.

2) Around 4:45 in the video, Maile makes a recommendation to have your call to action visible for social users to convert upon.

I would agree that you definitely want to make sure you figure out how to make your social media traffic have ROI for you, but remember that social media users are wary of commercial pages and too many calls to action. So when you do look at your call to action for social media users, make sure it is appropriate and respectful, so as not to make people uncomfortable or annoyed.

3) Maile recommends that if you have employees that are already on social networks, then let them represent your company there to help.

I would warn very strongly that before letting anyone represent your company in social media, you need to have a social media strategy and guidelines. Too many companies have had problems with employees saying something they should not have or making social actions that represent the company in a bad light.

Further, I would highly discourage letting anyone in your company perform content marketing campaigns unless they are a content marketing specialist, as the penalty for violating the TOS and being too aggressive or self promotional on sites like Reddit, StumbleUpon and Pinterest is too big and in most cases permanent.

I hope the video and above points were helpful and if you are not engaged in social media and content marketing, you better get started now!

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