Thankfully the days where brand marketers' beliefs concerning their websites were 'if you build it they will come' are long gone. It is now pretty much universally accepted that some sort of web marketing strategy is needed to increase brand awareness, site traffic and ultimately, sales. This is why many marketers use a full service digital agency to manage a brand's web presence from the initial design and build of a website to the marketing, the SEO and the online brand management.

For those people on the periphery of the field of web marketing, SEO is the Holy Grail. And with good reason: it gets your site higher in the Google SERPs, getting more traffic and more sales. SEO professionals and indeed those people on the periphery of the field understand the importance of link building in climbing the Google rankings; so much has been made of the importance of social media in SEO lately. But what is the truth?

Certainly, the burgeoning trend for using social media over the past couple of years has revolutionised the way we use and interact with the internet. Sites like Twitter and Facebook have incredibly high Pagerank and it is easy to fall into the trap of linking back to your site from such sites in order to build trustworthy links and to improve SERP position.

However (and it is a big however) using Twitter for link building has two major flaws and this is the part where your digital agency should have interrupted your lavish plans for a Twitter-based link building project.

The first flaw is that links on Twitter fall into the category of what is known as nofollow links. That is the say that when the Googlebot visits the site, it doesn't follow those links anyway. Thus, the benefit of having them there is greatly reduced to, well, next to nothing.

The second problem is the nature of the posts we make on Twitter. That 140 character limit means that few URLs that SEO executives try to link to are ever going to fit. This results in the use of URL shorteners. Granted, they let you fit your big long URL in the box, but that shortened URL is almost valueless in terms of SEO. This is simply because the text in a link is directly related to Google's ranking of a site: so irrelevant numbers and letters in a shortened URLbacklinks seo offer very little in SEO terms.

Don't write of social media altogether though. Your digital agency should be using it as part of your online brand management. It is useful as a means of raising brand awareness, increasing traffic and interacting with consumers on a more personal level than a TV advert ever allowed. Just don't rely on social media too extensively for SEO.