An excerpt from an e-mail from my friend, client, and SEO guru Ted Mueller...
Adding a whole bunch of backlinks at once can be spammy, it’s important that they appear “natural” meaning the show up over time and don’t have the exact same anchor text every time. Personally, I think backlinks are becoming less relevant, but they are still helpful especially when they are from related/respected domains to your business. For instance – a backlink from something like the WordPress gallery/showcase.
I also would agree citations / local citations are very important and you should consistently work on those. The getlisted.org is a good free tool to use, yext is kind of expensive but basically does the same thing for you vs. you doing all of those yourself. Also, it’s important/helpful to have your actual address with things like the Secretary of State and DBA with the local county clerk office match those and Google also reconciles with those databases. More info on this can be found on the Local University blog: http://localu.org/blog/ and or by following/reading David Mihm’s stuff as he started getlisted.org and is now the local guy at Moz https://twitter.com/davidmihm or http://moz.com/community/
users/439609 It's hard to say for certain how social media stuff effects SEO. There is some thought that “social signals” play a part, but it seems to be a small one. We do very little of that stuff for valoanstexas.com except for about once a week updating rate information on the facebook and twitter page, hardly any “link building” other than opportunities with related directories like the Vet Land Board etc., or an interview with a military benefits blog, etc.
There are all sorts of link building/social media/whatever the latest thing we think works and we can do a lot of tactics. Sometimes it does work, for a while, and then Google rolls out algorithm updates and it goes away. For me, it comes back to a term a guy named Will Reynolds with SEER interactive came up with called “doing RCS” – Real Company Shit….that makes sense for your company. Google it and read up on it, it is good thought provoking stuff.
Does a Facebook and Pinterest page for an asphalt shingle roofing company so they can update people with the latest shade of grey roof shingle make sense – no. Does it for a web design company – maybe, depends on how you use it. So just ask yourself is what you are thinking about doing a normal or natural business thing to so. Developing good content, like a blog post about websites for an industry, is helpful and installing the right keyword titles, meta, etc. is fundamental for SEO, but you also need to promote your content to the relevant markets, industry trades etc. which can naturally build links. It can be time-consuming and take a long time to be effective though.
No doubt being on page 1 is powerful. But it is dangerous to get there and count on it because it can go away overnight. So it’s always good to be developing other channels or looking at things like PPC advertising, referral sources etc. that may also work for you. So there is my 2 cents on a lot of typical “SEO GUY” type tactics, ask if it makes sense in the context of RCS.
