There a lot of buzz going on these days in the SEO niche about the Social Media link building vs traditional link building and where all the things going on after the recent Google updates as we all know, heard , read somewhere on the web and probably most of us encounter in our work as link builders every day.

The Social Media Buzz

Since 2011 when was finally out that Social Media sites like Facebook and Twitter pass value for search engine results , social media is factor that you must consider as part of your link building strategy. But let’s take a look how and what really we can benefit as link builders from the social media sites and can we rely on it so we can replace it with our traditional link building.

This will be your first mistake if you rely only on social media. The link from most of the social bookmarking site comes with no value. So focusing your efforts on building links from social bookmarking sites is something that you must consider from the beginning . As a link builder you should always aim for the quality traffic, you can drive traffic from social media sites but since traditional link building is most likely to drive quality traffic because your link is put there for purpose and the visitors will actually want to visit your site and to read your content to participate in your community or everything that you come out with, to engage your target audience seems much more reliable.

Traditional Link Building what is going on after recent Google Updates

Since the last updates of Google, link building changed a lot. Most of the well know methods and strategies are getting punished and by punished I mean real hard since the last Google Penguin update . For example article marketing, it is going down and it is going down fast. Most of the link builders and all the new link builders consider it as factor that is great to boost your traffic and ranking of your site. It is working you can actually get results with article marketing you will see your positions moving up on the SERPS. But you must have in mind that Google recently made articles links and continues to make them count for very little, most of the article marketing site are getting punished because of their low quality content and only for the last three words you must think seriously should you continue to put effort and time in something that will be definitely get penalized very soon. There are plenty of examples like link farms and networks, link directories , paid links, single blog post in so called Web 2.0 Blogs that are vastly discussed how you should avoid them and the reasons for that.

Link building and social media together

We all know about the great content and its values to our site. But how we can do it, ok so if you are smart enough and if you are putting efforts and time for thinking in a ways not so good for your site to boost your traffic and rankings you must be and smart enough to write great content to engage your audience. And that’s where social media comes from my personal opinion instead of buying low quality links , paid tweets and Facebook likes write a great content use social media sites to find people in your niche contact them , talk with them build a trust with your audience , build and audience that is interested with your work and niche and links will come. Social media is powerful factor and it surely will become more powerful in our daily work but as for now it can’t replace the traditional link building.

In conclusion my personal advice to all link builders is to focus their efforts on relying on much more quality content to avoid every possible low quality techniques of getting links back to your site, because you will get penalized trust me, engage people on social media sites it most likely to drive great traffic and to rank better with one good post on a trusted domain with your build trusted audience you will get likes, shares and etc. and that is where the social signal counts , instead of making thousand low quality links. There is no fast way to rank better, there is no fast way to do something great keep in mind that you main goal must be high quality, combining social media signals and high quality link building is something that will make you one step ahead of your competition.

Alexander Valchev is currently working in one of the fastest growing SEO and SEM companies in Bulgaria.You can find more about who are we on our company facebook page SEOPal and on tiwtter @seo_pal .