subject: Social Media & SEO: The Perfect Combination [print this page] Social Media & SEO: The Perfect Combination
One of the biggest surprises for me still to this day is seeing the number of small businesses getting themselves online and struggling with basic SEO! They're simply baffled by the subject of SEO, as if it's something totally unheard of to them.
I guess at the end of the day as a small online business owner myself, I'd come to expect every other online business owner to at least have some basic knowledge of SEO.
SEO as mentioned above stands for search engine optimization, and it is the process of enhancing the visibility of your website by the search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. Essentially there are 3 unique building blocks to SEO:
Content
Keywords
Links
Content
The content of your website needs to be appealing to both your market audience and the search engines as we know.
Creating content isn't a difficult task; you simply need to understand how to effectively create content that entices both avenues; your audience and the search engines. There are plenty of resources online explaining how content marketing effects your business and essentially how to create compelling content to promote your business website.
Keywords
Selecting the right keywords related to your business type or niche is a major factor. The most effective way to do this is by selecting 5 to 6 quality keywords or phrases and building your content around those keywords.
Links
Building SEO quality links (building link relations with other industry or niche related websites) is the third most important building block of SEO.
Remember the 5 to 6 keywords you selected when building your content? Now you need to select a few of these keywords and begin searching for sites online that are somewhat related to your industry similarly, that use the same keywords if you like, and begin exchanging links with these sites.
So in the smallest nutshell possible, that is basic and effective SEO that you can grasp and use to work towards improving your business website search engine rankings.
Social Media
I've talked a lot about social media on my personal blog, and one of the things that is pretty obvious is the number of small businesses now getting involved in using social media for marketing purposes, but also the larger companies as the likes of Coca-Cola and IBM are also starting to see the potential in social media too.
I do believe that when it comes to thinking about social media for business it can be a daunting venture at first, there is nothing online that makes the process of understanding it easier for first timers.
As a business involved in social media for almost 3 years, I tend to mainly encourage clients to get involved in using the most popular and relevant sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, these sites offer a huge amount of potential for promoting products and services online.
Combining goo SEO practices and social media is all you need to get your small business website marketing commitments together; the web is full of resources, tips and advice so make good use of it.
