Lately, some of the most effective backlinking you can get is the kind that you don’t do — and the SEO company doesn’t do, either. It’s the kind that your social media followers do for you, and a decent part of today’s SEO efforts ought to be devoted to allowing your followers to do just that. That includes, among other things, adding social media buttons (i.e. Facebook’s “Like” button, Pinterest’s “Pin” button, Google+’s “+1″ button, and all of the various social bookmarking buttons like Digg and so forth.) to pretty much every single piece of content that your company puts on the internet.

Blog posts, web pages, emails, tweets, press releases, marketing articles — with a bit of care, almost every digital communication you make can be branded and have social media buttons. That opens up the opportunity for people to link from their social media profiles to the communication they clicked from — which is free, automatic, and valuable SEO. All you had to do was put a button on your blog post (or whatever).

Of course, the value of this trick is multiplied tenfold if you have a professional social marketer out there using YOUR social profiles and generally treating your clients in a personal, friendly fashion while talking about your area of business. A social marketing engineer can start a significantly-sized crowd chatting about your product or service (forums are great for this kind of thing) — and social buttons can expand the SEO value of those crowds hugely.

Social media buttons won’t ever completely replace traditional SEO efforts — but they can expand on them inexpensively and effectively, and that’s what everyone wants most, right?

Keywords
A properly set up blog can help you automatically target a few choice keywords even if you’re not SEO savvy enough to work them into your posts. By choosing categories, tags, and even usernames that are the very keywords you want to target, you make sure that those keywords show up a few times per page. If you are SEO savvy enough to toss them into your titles and opening paragraphs, you can redouble the effects — but even if you’re a complete SEO ignorant, a custom-built blog can go a long way toward getting your rankings up just because of it’s background mechanics.

Relevance
One thing that every backlink needs in order to boost your rankings is relevance. Because you create the content yourself, blogs are pretty much always relevant to the pages you link them to. You are blogging about business on your business blog and personal stuff on your personal blog, right? Then you’re pretty much good on the relevance front.

Link Structure
You’ve probably got more than one page that surfers could land on. Maybe you have a home page, an About Us page, and a Testimonials page. With your blog, you can link to each of those pages, and link to the more important pages more often. That’ll help Google decide which pages to direct traffic to. Furthermore, if you’re clever, you can help Google decide which pages on your site are relevant to which keywords by consistently linking, for example, “Custom Blog Creation” to the same page on your site — say, the one where you offer to custom-make blogs for your clients.

Freshness
Freshness — in other words, unique content that’s been created recently — is one of the things that Google loves more than anything else. It’s one of the core tenants of organic SEO: fresher content is better than stale. Blogs by their very nature insist that you produce fresh content by doing your blog posting on a regular basis, so you get freshness automatically alongside your keywords, relevance, and link structures.

Yep, blogs are pretty much going to be a part of the SEO game forever — better get back to posting yours!

Here are the four other sources of traffic that are most commonly used when proper SEO isn’t in place.

Banner ads

Only 2% of visitors to any website come from a banner ad. They usually cost money to place and many of these visitors are not targeted. There shouldn’t be a lot of effort wasted on banner ads.

PPC marketing

Approximately 16% of website visitors arrive at a site through ads placed on Google and other search engines. It is an expensive proposition to run a marketing campaign on Google and most people hire a PPC management company to do it for them.

Social marketing

About 5% of the visitors to a website come from a social marketing site like Twitter or Facebook. Social marketing is an important part of any business’ web presence, but it simply does not compare to natural SEO.

Text ads

These are ads that could be placed in a classified ads directory, on other sites or at the bottom of articles sent out. These ads only bring in about 0.5% of all visitors to websites across the world. There has been a lot written about article marketing, but while it does have its place, it should not be counted on to bring in a lot of traffic. It is best used for backlinking.

Natural SEO

There is nothing that can compete with organic SEO and probably nothing ever will. Proper SEO will bring in about 77% of the traffic to websites across the world. The only way that you can compete with the big guns out there is to have your site ranking near the top of Google. You can use the other sources of traffic, but don’t forget about the one that will give you the highest traffic volume.

In other words, 80% of your profit comes from 20% of your customer base. Similarly, 80% of your problems come from 20% of your customer base — and it’s probably NOT the same 20%. This has led to, among other things, a sudden focus on reducing your customer base as a valid business strategy — just make sure you cut the customers that create problems, not the ones creating the profit.

In the world of SEO, this is also true on a large scale. It turns out that of all of the money spend on Search Engine Marketing each year, 80% of it is spent on pay-per-click marketing, and only 20% is spend on organic SEO. Conversely, of all of the traffic that flows through Google and it’s competitors, 80% of it is organic (i.e. it comes from the actual search results and not the PPC ‘sponsored placement’s.) The other 20% is pay-per-click traffic.

So, 80% of the money results in 20% of the traffic — and 20% of the money results in 80% of the traffic. By my math, that makes every dollar you spend on SEO some sixteen times more valuable than each dollar you spend on PPC. That isn’t to say that PPC doesn’t have it’s advantages — instant traffic is more useful in terms of cashflow than traffic that doesn’t come for a few weeks or even months down the road — but sixteen times? That kind of efficiency can buy a lot of patience.

Of course, there are options to dramatically improve the payoff of pay-per-click marketing. Many SEO companies are offering PPC management services that can quadruple the effect of PPC — so it’s only one-quarter as efficient as SEO. Still, unless you absolutely can’t wait for the traffic, SEO is probably your better option.

If you spend 100 hours over a month and the website doesn’t meaningfully improve it’s rankings in that time, you’re clearly doing something wrong. On the other hand, if you’re seeing huge results for that 100 hours, you need to know what you did right so that you can repeat it for other sites in the future!

There aren’t a lot of studies done on this kind of thing, but around here we’ve noticed that two activities consistently seem to be pretty much the LEAST time-efficient things to do: forum posting and social bookmarking.

Now why would an SEO company talk about how bad it is to purchase two of their services? Because, as you might have guessed, I’m about to flip the script on you.

You see, by combining forum posting and social bookmarking, you can create side benefits that far outweigh their value in terms of improving your rankings directly. Both of them engage a very powerful force that most SEO gurus will rarely ever mention: communities.

Communities are groups of people online who gather to talk about a specific topic. If you’ve ever been part of a message board devoted to a single topic — whether it’s ‘Elements The Game’ or ‘How To The Economy’ — you know how rabid the posters on a dedicated forum can be. They also generally have a place where you can post links to stuff you like or whatnot.

Social bookmarking sites, on the other hand, have Vote buttons that allow you to give something a positive bump. Get enough votes, and your link might make it into some list of daily, weekly, or monthly Top X in a given category. If that happens, the result is an instant and long-lasting surge in traffic through that site.

See where this is going? If you can get popular on a forum related to your subject, create some material that the forum-goers would like, and then link to a social bookmarking site that links to the material you created, you can essentially get a huge pile of free votes from the forum-goers. Make it into the list with those free votes, and all that ‘lost’ time efficiency goes out that window as the traffic surges in.

Pretty neat, huh?