Micheal Martinez is calling us all out today. He says that anyone who gets a substantial amount of their traffic from social media sites should reexamine their title. He says you shouldn’t call your self a search engine optimizer if you are spending significant amount of time working the social media angle, including putting social media buttons on your site.

From Micheal’s post:

Social media optimization is another form of Web marketing like pay-per-click optimization, like banner advertising, like newsletter distribution, etc.

People need to stop blurring their distinctions between social media and search media. Search media requires a set of very different rules and guidelines. People do try to leverage social media to obtain competitive search rankings but that’s just linking and there are competitive linking methodologies. Linking, as I have often pointed out, is not search engine optimization, it’s linking.

So really what are you optimizing for?

I am a participant in Social Media. I use StumbleUpon and Twitter to find new content. But I don’t get my traffic from social media predominantly. Over the past 365 days my traffic breaks down like this:

Forty-eight percent of my traffic comes from search engines, mainly Google. A close second is referring sites with about 42% of my total traffic, and, finally, the 10% of my traffic that comes from the people with the good sense and intelligence to visit me directly. First, thanks to all the direct people. Second here are my top referrers:

Over the past year StumbleUpon, a social media site, is the second highest traffic sender across all sources. They it makes up 17% of my total traffic over the past year. Two of my top five pages have accomplished their position thanks to StumbleUpon, Internal Linking Strategies & Landing Page Testing. I don’t think that SU is really that remarkable as a traffic source, it doesn’t account for a large source of links, but it does introduce people to my content. I think that the use of social media to supplement your visibility and bring new traffic can be a legitimate part of linking strategy. In spite of all the direct opposition that Micheal voices against links I don’t think even he would deny that your search optimization campaigns should involve a link strategy.

But this calls out an interesting question? Should I put buttons on blog? I have put them on client properties, they didn’t really seem to improve the volume of social media referrals. For this blog in particular, all marketing blogs really, buttons seem redundant and self-important. The people I know through social media should be on their own devices if they think my work deserves to be submitted.

Still Micheal Martinez, I think inadvertently, makes the point that you are leaving something on the table by not taking advantage of social media. My referrals, including StumbleUpon, make a serious contribution to my geographic distribution.

Clearly my traffic indicates that I spend more time grooming this site for organic search, but maybe that is a mistake. If Micheal is right and I could double that channel why wouldn’t I? Especially since it seems to have a positive effect on how widely my work gets distributed.

If you are looking into your Social Media rewards you should call out some specific values that social media may have over your normal traffic sources.

1. Geographic Distribution
2. Contribution to Top Content
3. Syndication Use
4. Variety of Links