You hear over and over again how important it is to participate in the community when it comes to social media and search marketing. Well, that’s mostly because it’s true.

Google acknowledged this in a recent post to the Webmaster Central blog, which we discussed further here.

"If your site is rather new and still unknown, a good way marketing technique is to get involved in the community around your topic," says Google’s Kaspar Szymanski. "Interact and contribute on forums and blogs. Just keep in mind to contribute in a positive way, rather than spamming or soliciting for your site. Just building a reputation can drive people to your site. And they will keep on visiting it and linking to it. If you offer long-lasting, unique and compelling content — something that lets your expertise shine — people will want to recommend it to others. Great content can serve this purpose as much as providing useful tools."

At SMX Advanced WebProNews spoke with Gil Reich of Answers.com about link building, and he had some interesting things to say about links on Twitter and other social media sites with regards to shortened URLs (starting around 4:50):

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For example, he talks about getting keywords in short URLs.

While community is obviously very important to online marketing, there are still plenty of more technical factors that should be taken into consideration. Things like what Reich is talking about, things like Twitter’s resonance algorithm for sponsored tweets (which will probably become a bigger factor in the future), and things like Facebook’s Open Graph and how it pertains to search on Facebook.