Beginning in 1998, I formed one of the first web development and SEO companies in South Carolina. That was back in the days when HotBot, Lycos, and AltaVista still mattered. The techniques behind SEO for lawyers were VASTLY different than they are today. I continue to delve deeply into the art of SEO for attorneys, blogging, web design, and more. The landscape now includes an emphasis on social media influence (social signals), semantic indexing, and so on. All of this brings me to the balance between SEO and Engagement on Google Plus or what I call “Diversifying Your Social Media Investment Portfolio.”
Diversification is the Key to Long Term Success
Like many other folks from many different industries, I’m on Google Plus for varied reasons, such as promoting my law practice, establishing social influence, and engaging with others. In other words, I don’t put my entire social media investment portfolio into one basket, namely narrowly focused strategic SEO.
Short Term Gains vs. Long Term Influence
My background in search engine optimization for law firm websites leads me to one inevitable conclusion – while focused SEO strategies may work in the short run, they’ll come back to haunt you in the long run. Take, for example, inbound linking strategies. For the projects I’ve worked on, I always emphasized quality over quantity. I stayed away from link farms, etc., even back when these strategies certainly worked to boost sites. Thankfully, that meant that the sites I was involved with didn’t get penalized by Google Panda. Am I saying I am prophetic? Heck no! What I am saying is that if you don’t diversify your strategy, then: (1) it’s hard to adapt to changes, and (2) sooner or later, Google will pick up on the strategy and take away and penalize you for it.
Targeted Strategies on Google Plus Don’t Equal Engagement.
On Google Plus, it doesn’t take a trained eye to start to see targeted SEO-driven patterns vs. actual Engagement. The patterns typically involve a group of cooperative folks within a niche who (1) link dump (just posting links without any commentary); (2) systematic plus one each other’s posts (which, in and of itself, I think is OK especially when there’s little time to read them); (3) share dumped links (what I call “double dumping”); (4) share posts without reading them regardless of whether the posts have any value to a reader; and (5) other ways to call attention to low-value posts in a round-robin fashion.
Prediction Why Narrowly Targeted Strategies May Fail
So, here’s my simple prediction for what it is worth. Google eventually catches up to every “system” SEO enthusiasts engage in “game” the system on Add a Tooltip Text
