

Search vs. Social: viral is the new SEO - jaf12duke
http://measuringmeasures.com/blog/2010/6/17/search-vs-social-viral-is-the-new-seo.html

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MicahWedemeyer
SEO is not dead, social media is not a replacement. Ignore SEO to your own
detriment.

Real life example: My startup, DoLeaf (<http://doleaf.com>). We get the
majority of our sales via SEO/Google. All we had to do to get there was to
make sure to follow basic SEO guidelines (title tag, h1's, etc.)

People find us by searching on Google for very specific plants. They see a
result that says "Buy XXX on DoLeaf". Click result, click checkout, done.
Google sends high quality, high conversion traffic. Once we set it up, it
required no further work on our part. Day and night, Google is sending us
sales.

Contrast that to social media. Do we entice people to tweet about our plants?
Add them to their Facebook profile? What? And how to do it? Successfully
spinning up a viral loop is difficult to do and difficult to track. Finally,
social media mentions grow stale pretty quick, so you've got to constantly
feed that machine somehow to stay relevant.

We're not planning on ignoring social media, but you definitely should not
ignore SEO. It hasn't been replaced by social media, just augmented. A
different tool, a different purpose.

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bradfordcross
Cool example. Interested in doing a guest post about it?

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jamesshamenski
Great quality post @BradfordCross.

I've been thinking about the value of social sharing. Especially, quantity vs
quality.

Broad social sharing ('quantity' AKA buzz, tweet, like, etc) returns little
back to me. I've shared tons of links on twitter and essentially nobody says
anything in return. But i check bit.ly (by adding a '+' to the url) and see
some real use. I feel an obligation to only tweet interesting links for
reputation purposes but it's not apparently rewarding.

Contrast forward to HN (quality). Far less traffic, but great community
interaction with the content. For me, the discource here is more valuable.
Heck, down voting my comments is really valuable feedback (notice how on
twitter you never get someone replying back to you with "that tweet sucked"
(exception being, you threaten their reputation). Thus, HN completely alters
how i interact with content.

HN is only good at distributing certain things and we try to keep it unique
here. For content creators, HN can be part of the social strategy but for
content consumers on HN each comment seems more valuable than a retweet. Maybe
that's why we are not tweeting links to HN discussions (things get less
valuable in public).

Does the quality of the HN community hurt the potential quantity of links
spreading virally?

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Julianhearn
Facebook driving more traffic than google, no chance.

This article is pure linkbait.

If you think you survive without google traffic just block google bot in your
robots.txt

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iamdave
Making a campaign and calling it "viral" doesn't make it so.

