Getting the Most from Social Media

Welcome to my website about blogging, Twitter and other forms of social media. My name's Matt Hayden and I live in Perth, Western Australia. I've been blogging for about a decade or so, and have learned a lot about the medium as a result. In the last couple of years I've gotten heavily into Twitter, after resisting it initially. It's an amazing site, with seemingly limitless possibilities. It's also immediate and just a lot of fun to use.

Blogging, while no longer the "new kid on the block", remains a fantastic way to communicate opinions, ideas and information as well as connect and interact with readers. And as long as you just keep at it, writing good interesting posts, they'll start to appear in search engines eventually.

But you can hasten this process greatly by actively sharing your posts on social networking and microblogging sites. (Please check out my page listing recommended ebooks about blogging and social media.) Not only will you get more direct clicks, but you can connect with others in your niche, some of whom are sure to link back to you sooner or later. So, as you keep adding content and the backlinks accumulate, you really don't have to think that much about SEO.

This is a real bonus, because the whole field of search engine optimization is changing all the time. Google keeps updating and tweaking its algorithms in an effort to win the war against spam and deliver the best results possible to its users. Ultimately this is a good thing, but it does mean that some techniques that worked fine (and were deemed acceptable) in the past become useless, or even counterproductive.

A prime example of this was the fallout from the Penguin update of April 2012. Many quality, legitimate websites were hit by this major algorithm change, mainly because they had too many backlinks with the same or similar anchor text. Needless to say, such changes can be frustrating for webmasters keen to get quality search engine traffic.

So the rise of social media is a good thing for content publishers and consumers alike. Its use is something that Google actively encourages because it is a good way of building a more natural link profile. And the level of activity related to a particular website that occurs on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google Plus and other similar sites is now an algorithmic factor in its own right.

I have seen the effect of this signal on the traffic coming to my own sites. Having my pages shared seems to result in a small, but definite lift in their search engine rankings.

So, the more I write posts and share them, the more I learn about how these activities complement each other. And it's these little insights and lessons that will be included here. They'll be listed in the blog at first. But I'll add separate pages on various aspects of social media use in time. Ultimately this will be a good resource for anyone wanting to use them to get more blog traffic.