subject: Seo And Social Media: Success Integrated Part 1 [print this page] SEO and social media are powerful enough alone, but when combined can help businesses and individuals rocket to new heights of success never before thought possible. While initially it may have appeared to some skeptics that social media was nothing more than a trend, it's obvious that it's here to stay: sites like Facebook, MySpace and YouTube account for most of the world's web traffic. And though some people have claimed that search engine optimization was nothing more than gaming the system, its apparent now that SEO is actually a critical part of driving targeted and relevant leads to a website or landing page. Considering the benefits of both SEO and social media, understanding how to integrate both is essential to stay ahead of consumer trends and dominate whatever market you're in.
SEO or search engine optimization is the strategic process of making your website more visible in search engines for the keywords that you target. However, this should not be confused with SEM or search engine marketing, where people pay search engines for traffic to their websites. SEO seeks to improve the quality and increase the total volume of a site's traffic organically.
Social media refers to the sharing of information and content on the web through sites like MySpace, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Technorati and many others. Businesses use social media to directly interact with their consumers and the public at large in the places where they can be found in the highest numbers most often on Facebook, which is the number 2 most frequented website on the internet.
So how do you integrate these powerful internet marketing methods? The most effective way is by building links between the two.
One of the primary objectives of many SEO strategies is to build a significant amount of backlinks to a website's main and interior pages. This is done by creating a presence for your site on the web through blogging, article marketing, blog commenting, forum participation, web 2.0 properties and link wheels, press releases and a number of other effective strategies.
Social media also builds links, but in different ways. When a person shares a video or picture, republishes an article or posts it on their profile, shares a page or link or bookmarks an item, this automatically creates links that can be indexed by search engines.
Remember- search engines (especially Google) interpret backlinks like a "vote" for a particular web page. The more votes the better provided that they're relevant to the website.
In order to combine SEO and social media, you must connect and interlink the two. Your social media pages should be a direct reflection of your business, and in fact your branding campaigns should carry over to social media. By gaining more attention in social media, you'll also be gaining more traffic to your website especially if you use social media platforms to market your products or services. You can post special deals for your customers on your profile or you can run a contest, create a game or anything else that gets your customers involved and excited about your company.
Your website should also allow visitors to immediately connect with you via social media. This can be accomplished by embedding videos from YouTube or other sites, by including social media plugins on your website and by encouraging your consumers to get involved by enticing them with a special deal or offer.
In SEO and Social Media: Success Integrated Part 2 we'll discuss how Social Proof and Direct Marketing Gone Viral are key elements to a powerful internet marketing campaign.
