Major Trend Alert: Shared Links Can Trump SEO for Internet Marketing

NYTimes "share this" imageLink sharing inspired by social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and/or LinkedIn is nothing new. But fresh data published in Sunday’s New York Times by Brad Stone in his article, “Share The Moment And Spread the Wealth” reinforces the fact that this trend is continuing to gather momentum. It is doing so even to the extent that it has become equally important and now sits side-by-side with SEO (the historically dominant technique for building website traffic via Google) as a strategy for increasing the visibility for your website.

This underscores the powerful points made by some of my favorite thought leaders. Whether you call it building your “Tribe” as Seth Godin does or creating a “World Wide Rave” as David Meerman Scott articulates the opportunity, I have to say that whether you are a marketer or just a business owner, social networking has now crossed a major trend line. If you didn’t consider it essential before, now there is no doubt (at least in my mind) that social networking that encourages link sharing must now be considered a mission critical component of every company’s marketing plan.

For this reason, ComBridges’ is increasingly offering more social media marketing services in a variety of formats, including contract, consulting and even mentoring/coaching. Click here to request a free consultation.

FYI, I’m also very excited to let you know that I will be covering social media marketing and related topics in our upcoming EBiz Express Teleseminar series. Be sure to subscribe to our “It’s a Wonderful Web” enewsletter if you want to be invited. The guests/co-presenters will be awesome, and we are keeping this educational series very affordable.

WordPress Websites Under Attack

I’m glad to see the comments on the post below about the maintenance and other issues involved in running a WordPress website. Unfortunately, just now, these challenges have increased as a result of idiot hackers who are violating WordPress websites to insert “black hat” permalinks. How lame and what a nuisance, and more evidence of my old saying, “It’s always more complicated than you think it is.”

If you are responsible for a WordPress website, heads up and here’s a good article with links to other useful articles: “Old WordPress Versions Under Attack” by Lorelle on WordPress. More useful information is in Andy Sowards post.

We were working on service level agreements this week that we plan to propose to our ComBridges clients in order to cover this kind of maintenance service. In the meantime, if you are a ComBridges client, we’ll let you know if your site is in need of service and any additional costs that may be involved.

Thanks for spreading the word (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) so that everyone becomes aware of this issue as quickly as possible.

And putting this aside, Happy Labor Day weekend to you all!