by Jonathan Marshall Julia Batten from ClickZ wrote a great article this morning about generating buzz in social communities among your network, and then leveraging that buzz to help your link building and better your SEO efforts. When people create quality content that increases brand recognition, that is what keeps people coming back and eventually circulating your content for you. If it is interesting, people will care, and that is the long and short of it. That being said, the relationship between buzz, links and SEO is revealed: At Search Engine Strategies Toronto, the big buzz was generating buzz and gaining a social media presence — ultimately, how to get people talking about your brand online. Lots of discussion centered on the importance of buzz and how to build it, but more insight is always needed about how to leverage buzz for your SEO (define) efforts. How do you build buzz, use it to build link authority, and ultimately improve your search engine rankings?

Let's explore how buzz and SEO are related. We'll start with the basics: the importance of external links for search rankings. If Google sees a link to your site as a sort of "vote" for your site, and the Web site with the most votes gets to the top of the search engine results, then all other things equal, the more links you have, the better, right? Well, not exactly. Remember, the authority and relevance of your links are equally as important, if not more so, than the number of them. So all other things equal, the more authoritative, relevant links you have, the better your chances of being visible in the search engines for your keywords. But to get authoritative relevant links — and lots of them — you need buzz. You need to get people excited enough about your brand, product, Web site, or content to want to share it, actively, with others.

And when it comes to online, what better way to generate buzz (and links!) than through the plethora of social networks and user-generated content sites? When someone submits, shares, or promotes your content on one of these sites, they typically include a keyword-rich link to your content. As this content gets shared over and over, your site generates more inbound links. Therefore, your link authority increases over time, along with (hopefully) your organic search engine rankings. And there you have it — the relationship between buzz, links, and SEO. If you want a more in-depth and hands-on explanation of how to gain more online exposure for your business, a San Diego SEO training seminar is what will get you there.