The phenomenal rise in use of social networking Web sites is presenting many opportunities for Web visbility and search engine rankings. It is however, over-hyped, so it’s important to know that many social media sites will give your site the right exposure while others won’t.

People have been taking advantage of social media sites to boost their search engine rankings for sometime now. Sites such as Digg, Myspace, Twitter, Facebook and many others have been around for some time now. Increasingly, they’ve found ways to prevent people from using their sites only for search engine optimisation purposes. Some feel social media links will have their outbound link value nullified completely by Google, but this isn’t likely to happen.

It could be that social media popularity was due to social media SEO. That is, people are filling social media sites with new pages, videos, files, images, and posts because at the end of the day, there is a ranking benefit and accompanying financial benefit. When a social media prevents users from gaining an SEO benefit from posting, it stands to reason that site will suffer a heavy loss of users.

Blogs — Effective SEO Tools

A blog can be an important strategic tool for getting exposure on social media sites. Journalists, marketers, and blog are desperate for things to talk about. Blog content is often timely and even controversial, although some blog writers let their comments and dialog degrade into talk that actually hurts them. In fact, posts can present a public relations and branding problem. It’s not uncommon for a company to see its business plunge after off-colour posts appear on their blog. If content such as research, video, helpful articles and news bits are posted, they may get seen by other bloggers and social media site users might give a mention on their site. Therfore, social media sites are the seat of online viral marketing.

It is the viral marketing element that can pay big dividends if your story or video offers something of real value.  This is one of the challenges of social media marketing; to generate enthusiasm to generate news and newsworthy content.

Creating newsworthy content and generating links on social networking sites can take a lot of effort, however using social media SEO is one part of a productive search engine optimisation effort. Consider creating a topical video, blog, or post some research that others will find very interesting.

We’ve all been in the situation when for whatever reason our high ranking website needs to be moved from one web server to another.  This could be for dozens of reasons however it’s usually caused by a fallout with an existing hosting service provider, or maybe you’ve simply outgrown your current provider and need to move as the number of hits your site is receiving increases!

When you’re looking to move your website from one website to another the most important thing to consider is that all search engine spiders and domain name servers (DNS) have updated to point at the new server before you switch off your old one.

As a step by step guide this will involve:

1. Making a backup of your website on to the new server
2. Testing the website on the new server to ensure that there are no missing or broken pages.  Ideally you should not be able to tell the difference in content or site functionality between the old and new servers
3. Update your DNS to point at the new server
4. Wait for the Internet to catch up!  To do this we recommend leaving your old site live on the original server for at least two weeks if possible
5. Finally, once the search engine robots have fetched the site from the new server you’re safe to shut down the original website

You can find more information about this process via the links below, and if you would like to speak with us to discuss any aspect of your server move, give us a call!

http://www.yourseoplan.com/experts-move-server-seo.html

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/moving-to-a-new-web-host/