subject: Social Media Becoming An Integral Part Of Seo [print this page] Search engine optimization (SEO) is a term familiar to Internet marketing world. A relatively new term, social media optimization (SMO) is now gaining popularity among online marketers. Social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Diggit, Delicious, and other popular blogging, news or social networking sites are revolutionizing the world of online marketing. Many popular brands have already started their social media campaigns by joining an account in Facebook or Twitter. Blogs and articles are on their way to create more traffic to the Web site through social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Kaboodle and more.
With the advent of social media sites, new possibilities arose for brand marketing. Companies are exploring innovative ways to reach out to millions of customers who are active in their social networking community. A recent study conducted by Interbands shows that companies like CocaCola, IBM, GE, Microsoft, Google and others have gained hundreds of thousands of fans in popular social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter. Another study from ad network Chitika found that social media sites such as Facebook and Digg are more likely to create returning traffic to a Web site than popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo. The study found that more than one fifth of the users referred to a site by Facebook visited that site at least four times in the course of one week whereas only 12 percent of Google-referred visitors remained loyal.
The above findings further underline the importance of optimizing a Web site for social media. Any company that wants to sustain its brand value among reputed customers should immediately resort to social media optimization if they haven't done it yet. Optimizing a Web site for social media gives double advantage. Now SEO consultants are using this media to promote websites and create online buzz. Social networking sites are also very good sources for link building purpose. While the process helps a business reach out to millions of users directly, it also automatically helps increase the search engine ranking of the Web site. The reason behind this is that search engines such as Google and Yahoo have assigned a high page rank for social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Diggit, etc., so a link to these sites automatically adds to increasing the page ranking of your Web site.
Social media is here to stay. The earlier you catch it, the better.
