The Greg Parsons Project

I’ve been hearing a lot lately about social media sites as an alternative to “good SEO” because of the fluctuations that everyone is seeing in Google, and I’d like to touch base briefly on the 2 main social media sites and their effect to your business and relation to your company’s mantra.

First of all, if you’re going to worry about your business sinking every time Google has a blip, changes an algorithm, mixes up the SERPs, etc. then you may want to think about getting into a different business.  That’s a harsh truth, but one I feel that a lot of people need to hear.  These days, PageRank is constantly changing, SERPs are constantly changing, and you really need to stay on top of your game to make sure you aren’t doing ANYTHING even remotely close to black hat.  If you do, chances are you’ll have a short lived top ranking followed by a penalty that may outlive you and your kids.  Yes, they are that harsh.  So, that being said, back on-topic here.

As an alternative to good search engine traffic, I’ve been hearing a lot of people talking about the benefits of the social media sites, namely Digg and StumbleUpon.  These are indeed great sites, and they do offer something to the web community as a whole.  Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not downing these sites one bit.  I’d like to touch base on people’s perceptions of them though, and how they may affect the bottom line of your company.

My first suggestion is this: don’t rely on social media as a driver of consistent, quality traffic to your site.  As a general rule of thumb, traffic from social media sites are of very low quality, and are extremely inconsistent.  Even if you write a phenomenal article and somehow make it to the front page of Digg, the traffic you get, while very significant, will also be very short lived and the targeting of that traffic is extremely poor compared to targeted, optimized search traffic.  Sure, the traffic statistics on your site look impressive and you think you did something great (and you may have, don’t get me wrong), but chances are all you did was get a boatload of people to your site in a short period of time — and hopefully your servers could handle all of the traffic — who will probably never come back.  If you’re lucky, you got some bookmarkers or subscribers to your feed who will check back again later because they liked your style of writing.  But I’d almost bet you got little to no sales if you look at conversion ratios.

The moral of this short story is this, and it’s very simple.  In the time you took writing that “perfect” article to submit to Digg in hopes of hitting the front page, you could just be continuing to look at the BIG picture and working towards the long term of building links, creating solid, optimized content for your site, and hoping that Google notices you sometime soon.  Trust me, in the end, it will pay off and your work will be rewarded.

Short cuts get you nowhere, but certainly do give you the false illusion that you’ve done something great.  Take the long, proven path to success instead of the short cut.

This is a video of a tornado/waterspout spotted about 3 miles away from our house in Fort Myers. It only lasted about 3 or 4 minutes and then dissipated but nonetheless, pretty exciting.

Ok, so first of all I’d like to apologize for being out of the loop for a little bit here… but it’s been a relatively quiet summer with no huge changes at the GooglePlex so there’s not really been any fire stories to write about. I’ve been traveling and though not really what I’d call a vacation it’s been keeping me busy nonetheless.

In any event, the question of the day that someone posed to me this morning is this… Do MFA websites still work? Lots of people would disagree with me on my answer but I’ll say it anyway. I’d have to give an emphatic YES they still do work….BUT not in the way you would think….

Being on the net since the dawn of time (ok, since 1990 or so, anyway) I’ve seen things constantly evolving. This is one of those times. Do you have a bunch of MFA sites that used to make you money but for whatever reason they aren’t anymore? That’s fine… evolve them. Unless Google has banned you completely, you can still get a lot of miles out of those sites. You just have to (gasp) work for it now. Evolve the sites. Make them into something that is an actual resource for web surfers. Instead of just plastering AdSense ads all over the site, take some time and sit down and start writing some content on the sites. You have a (supposedly) aged and indexed domain, so make use of it.

You already know that “content is king”, so why aren’t you following that adage? Get to work and write, write, write!