Recently, SEO professionals and social media managers have been bickering over, whose practice has the higher authority when it comes to search engine page rankings, but if they stopped to reflect and compared the two strategies they may find that they are more closely related than they think. The main aim of both strategies is the same, i.e. targeted traffic generation, therefore, by combining the two you create a much more comprehensive and powerful online marketing method.
SEO and social media should not be treated as separate entities; blending them together will create a bigger, more prominent online brand presence far more easily than either of these two strategies could do standing alone.
Here are some examples of social media and SEO working together.
1. Natural link generation by the promotion of content on social networks.
In 2011 twitter has become a favourite source for people to learn about their favourite brands and companies. By promoting your content on twitter you are encouraging your followers to not only visit your website, but also send your link into their network in the form of re-tweets. Popularising your content this way gets the search engines to look favourably upon your website. Here are some staggering statistics showing why an SEO tweet should be considered.
· Twitter sees an average of 140 million tweets per day.
· 25% of tweets contain a URL.
· That means that there are 35 million tweets that contain a URL on twitter every day.
On Facebook, the number of likes your company page has is rapidly being overshadowed by the number of times your content is shared, rather than just liked. If you're offering a deal in return for a like of your page, it's just as easy for that person to unlike your page, the moment the deal is complete. However, when someone shares your content on their Facebook wall they are telling their personal networks that this is valuable information. And with the recent Facebook -- Bing integration the number of times your content is shared is being pulled into the search engine results, therefore, your SERP is being affected by the social networks.
2. Traffic generation via social networks.
Social networking sites are great for leaving teaser text, so by posting the first paragraph perhaps from your content teases the visitor way from your Facebook page and over to your blog or main website, where you have a much better chance of converting that visitor into a customer. Therefore by ensuring that you have a well optimised profile on the social networks should encourage traffic and visitors to visit your website.
SEO's main goal is to drive targeted traffic to your web site and social networking is about creating a buzz about your company with your audience, so by working SEO into your social network profiles, the two systems together will produce a steady stream of prequalified and well targeted visitors.
3. Increasing social networking means a bigger brand presence.
With a well executed SEO campaign it's possible to be ranked number one in Google with popular internal pages from your website. But if you're being active in the social networks, chances are you'll find your Facebook and LinkedIn profiles, dotted amongst the results, as your business profile is just as likely to be appearing in the SERP's. Often you'll find that search results include links that have been shared by your company's twitter profile and those that have been pasted to Facebook walls. And now with Google's new +1 button you can easily see how popular your website and its content are amongst the Google networks. Once again showing that good SEO in your social networking profiles increases your brand presence.
The influence of social media is growing, as evidenced by the number of social links showing up in the Google page rankings, so it makes sense to blend SEO campaigns with social media management adding an effective weapon to your arsenal of Internet marketing tools.
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