Social Media Buttons Are The New Affordable SEO

Affordable SEO is a tricky thing to pin down, because — like almost every other aspect of internet marketing — if too many people jump on any one bandwagon, it stops being effective, which is the same thing as saying it stops being affordable. This has happened to banner ads, PPC marketing, PCA shenanigans, BUM marketing, and even vanilla SEO. SEO companies are generally really good at finding the variations on the SEO theme that are still working, but sometimes something new and different is even better.

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?

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