One of digital marketing’s big selling points is that it is completely measurable. The same is true for social media, although calculating ROI can be a little more challenging in this channel than in others.

On channels like pay per click, search engine optimisation and email marketing, for example, the metrics to track and measure your goals are a little more obvious. In many instances, these goals are defined by clicks, sign-ups or purchases. This is more of a hard-sell and direct marketing approach.

Social media, on the other hand, is not a medium that lends itself to shameless punting of products. To gauge value here, brands have to consider return on engagement, rather than return on investment.

This may sound rather fluffy, so I will rephrase it. It’s important to make a distinction between conversions and conversations.

This is the key difference between social media marketing and traditional push marketing. Social media is all about conversations. Bear in mind that this is an attention economy, and nobody has to listen to you. Social media marketing takes a soft-sell approach, and you need to give your community a sense of value so that they have an incentive to interact with you and your brand.

This does mean that it can take longer for members of your community to convert into customers.

Frequently conversions from social media marketing efforts are quite indirect, making them harder to track.  The real value is that, if you manage these relationships properly and build up a good rapport with the contacts in your social networks, your brand is bound to reap the rewards of vocal brand ambassadors and general social media good will.

“But where is the tangible value then?”, I hear you ask.

It’s there, don’t worry. And social media metrics and be specified. When defining which metrics are going to be important, you have to first decide what it is you want to measure. These are your goals essentially.

Marketing goals

Do you want to increase traffic to your site? Improve brand positioning? Reach new customers? These are all marketing goals which can easily be measured in social media marketing.

Utilising an analytics solution (like Google Analytics) will allow you to segment where your visitors come from. This means you can easily ascertain which visits are coming from social media sources, as well as what they’re doing on your website.

Other metrics to consider when trying to measure engagement could be things like the number of comments on a post, interaction on your Facebook wall, new “followers” or “friends” or the number of times a tweet was retweeted. These are all measures of how effectively you are engaging with people, and how interesting they find your content.

Product and customer service goals

Social media is particularly effective if it is incorporated as part of your business’ broader CRM (customer relationship management) strategy.

Here you are able to gauge customer sentiment about your products and services, and perhaps solicit advice from customers about what they’d like from your products and services. This type of market research can help to steer your brand’s product offerings in the right direction, and it gives you a good idea of how your brand is currently perceived.

Questions and queries can also be addressed in real time, making customers feel more connected to the brand. This is an important part of CRM, but it does require a cohesive strategy and communication between your marketing and sales teams to ensure that customers receive an integrated and seamless experience with your brand.

In addition to driving potential product and service development, feedback from social media channels can also inform your organic marketing strategy. This can include anything from providing more lateral ideas for keywords for which to optimise your site, to informing your content strategy based on what your customers are looking for.

When correctly implemented and administrated, a social media marketing strategy can be a valuable part of any business’ holistic marketing strategy. It’s important to remember that people are talking about your brand right now, regardless of whether you are there or not. Do you know what they’re saying?

Link building is, without a doubt, the most tedious and time-consuming task facing any SEO or webmaster. Like it or not though, link building is a fundamental and important part of the Search Engine Optimisation process. Search engine algorithms do take links into consideration when ranking sites, and there is no substitute for high-quality backlinks when trying to show a site’s authority or expert status.

I’ve spoken about the different types of links and their role in Search Engine Optimisation previously. To reiterate the two points relate specifically to this post remember that a) natural links work best and b) the company you keep is important when it comes to linking effectively.

So, when I talk about link building strategies here, I am talking about more than merely going onto link directories and adding your site in the appropriate category. This certainly isn’t the worst thing you can do (and it’s on the list). However, there are numerous other ways to encourage backlinks to your site.

What follows are 5 suggestions for effective link building strategies.

1. Submit to link directories

There is still a place for directory submissions, provided you submit your site to relevant (industry related) directories, and under the correct categories. Check the PageRank of the directory too to see how Google values its importance.  Backlinks from better directories will be more valuable from an SEO perspective.

Remember to vary your anchor text and try to use your keywords in the description and title fields as naturally as possible.

2. Write articles (and syndicate them)

Create and syndicate articles on sites like EzineArticles and GoArticles. The great thing about good article directory sites is that their article pages usually rank well and send highly qualified traffic to your website.

Well written general articles will be syndicated elsewhere creating more backlinks to your site via the author bio. While these links may not have the power they once did (due to the fact that search engines discount duplicate content), these articles do give your brand exposure on multiple platforms and can send qualified traffic directly to your site.

Articles also go a long way towards establishing your site as an authority on a specific subject matter. Articles that are well written should be referenced and linked to in other posts and articles, which definitely does pass on link authority.

3. Provide useful and unique content

This may seem obvious, but creating content that people see as valuable and that they want to read is one of the best ways to build links naturally.

It’s neither possible nor practical to try to cater to everyone’s interests or tastes – so focus on what you’re good at and work on providing value to your peers in your industry. Be aware though, that this natural “softly softly” approach can take time.

4. Email people and make friends

Simply ask for links!

Not sure where to start? Run queries in Google and Yahoo Site Explorer to see who’s linking to your competitors’ domains, and which non-competing sites rank well for the keywords for which you’d like to rank. This should provide you with a list of sites to target for linking requests.

Remember though, as webmasters receive loads of link requests, ensure that you are original in your request and that you can offer them value through an exchange. Suggest a page where the link could be placed, and to where on your site you’d like it to go. Webmasters are inclined to be more receptive to requests when it’s clear you’ve actually looked at their site.

5. Help others help you

Also, while you’re building a network related to your vertical, why not contribute to other non-competing blogs or sites as a guest blogger? Most website owners love new (and unique) content, but don’t necessarily have the time to create it themselves. Guest posts serve a dual purpose for you – they are a way to get decent backlinks to your own site, and they are an exercise in brand-building and online PR.

Link building certainly isn’t the easiest part of SEO, but it’s very necessary. Have you found any link building strategies that have been particularly effective for you? Let us know in the comments.

If you were to think of Search Engine Optimisation rankings as being the top of a three-legged stool, the three considerations (or legs) that would support the seat are: technical considerations (such as keyword density, meta-tags, mark-up), content considerations (keyword strategy, structure of content, synonyms, readability) and finally “expertness”.

Because search engines are all about delivering the most relevant results for specific search queries, they all look for signals of relevance, popularity, trust and expertness (or authority) amongst the pages in their indexes. Ensuring that your site is well optimised technically and in terms of content is an important part of SEO. However, in order for this stool to stand, it needs its third leg – its expert status.

But how do search engines decide which sites are experts in a particular subject area, and which are not?

When Google guys Larry Page and Sergey Brin began piecing together how hyperlinked documents (like the WWW) fit together, they developed PageRank. Effectively, PageRank measures the relative importance of a page or document within the set. While PageRank uses numerous variables to do this, one of the most important aspects of PageRank is that is looks at links. And indeed, where these links come from and where they go. Each link is seen as a “vote” or a citation for the page it’s linking to.  So links from sites which are already seen as being an authority (like .edu or .gov top level domains), will count for more than links from a link directory.

Not all links are created equal. Some are more valuable than others, and certainly those that appear to be organic and natural are worth more than those gathered from link exchanges. And it’s not only the links into your site that matter, who you link to is also very important.

Within your site too, the way you link (and virtually silo related content) is an important part of your on-site SEO. You internal linking strategy should provide easy access to your content for your human visitors and search engines. Ensuring adequate linking to top-level pages also gives search engines a good indication of what your site is about as well as what’s important. It’s vitally important to pay attention to your links’ anchor text too. The anchor text of a link refers to the actual words that are hyperlinked, and these should contain keywords that describe the page to which they link.

To summarise, there are three types of links that you should be focusing on developing to boost your SEO performance: inbound links (from external sites), outbound links (it matters who you link to, experts link to experts!) and internal links.

Be wary of the company you keep, and develop links with relevant partners in the same or a related vertical to yourself.

Finally, try to encourage deep-linking to your site; don’t just build links to your homepage. Remember that natural links from within a site’s content are more valuable than links on a link-exchange page. Avoid link farms and paid links – it’s never worth it.