Social Media Marketing and how to waste your money in SEO

Lets face it, Social Media Marketing is a growing phenomenon, and here at social media marketing 101, we try to help you with business ideas, relevant topics, how to, and how not to succeed on Internet Marketing.

With Billions of websites in the web, competition for the number one spot in the search engines is fierce. Those who can achieve the coveted top ten places per specified keyword have the potential of making millions of dollars. This fact has created an entire new industry, Search Engine Optimization. Search Engine Optimization can make you a millionaire, or rob you of your hard earned money.

The main purpose of SEO is simple enough: to be showcased in the top spots by the search engines for a particular key word or phrase. How to do it, is as clear as muddy water, and like in the Old West, the Snake Oil salesmen are a dime a dozen. Inbound links is one way to get there.

When your credibility as a blogger, or as a subject matter expert is well recognized by all, people will quote you as a source on their own blogs, or websites; or they will just simply cut and paste your article, links and all, and pt it on their website or blog. That is an inbound link. When search engines comb the net indexing websites, they find those inbound links to your site and think: hmmmm, there is a lot of people linking to this site, content should be good, let me place it high; and your page rank increases.

When your buddy and you place each other’s links on their respective web sites, a reciprocal link is formed. You have two links pointed at each other. It is not hard to figure out that you are doing me a favor and I am returning the favor. Google does not assign that much value to those links. They are not bad, but not great.

Unless you work for Google as a programmer, or you are a world class psychic, you will not know exactly how to place high on the search engines.

Those ads that you see promising #1 Google Ranking in days, might be the proverbial Snake Oil chuck wagon. Since what many of these businesses do is to collect hundreds or thousands of domains, and create thousands of web pages, in which, for a price, they will place the link to your website. Those are called link farms. When search engines find you there, they tend to penalize you by not counting your links (you just wasted your money) of by blocking their indexing robots from going through your site.

It is believed that in some occasions, when the same URL appears many times within a single web page, it is counted only as one, thus defeating the purpose of commenting many times in particular blogs, or web pages.

So, since I have just given so many bad news, let me give you some middle of the ground news: do try to contact the webmaster or admin of popular blogs, offer them to write an article for them. If it is well written, and offers promise, and they publish it with your links, chances are, those will give you a lot of inbound links; and the best part, it is free.

Talk to me, tell me your opinion, and money-making suggestions, readers will thank you.