One big reason why your business should have a Facebook page or Pinterest account is because social media impacts SEO – big time. Read on for why! First of all…
What is Social Media?
According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, social media can be defined as any form of electronic communication (such as Web sites) through which people create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, etc.
Social media are also an online medium through which individuals, companies or organizations can create, share, and exchange information, ideas, and interests in a virtual community.
What is SEO?
SEO is an abbreviation for search engine optimization or search engine optimizer. Search engine optimization is simply a combination of strategies, techniques, and tactics used to increase the number of visitors to a website by ranking high in search engines such as google, yahoo, bing and so on.
When a website has a very high SEO ranking, it becomes relatively easy for people who are searching for such a website to find it easily on search engines. Thereby making it easier to drive more traffic to the website.
The Impacts of Social Media on SEO
Social media and SEO are beginning to look more and more like each other each day. This means that SEO is taking on more and more characteristics of social media every day. This is not to say that SEO is turning into social media marketing where people communicate with each other on some SEO network. However, it does mean that social media is beginning to impact SEO in big ways.
Social media has a major impact on SEO. This is called “social signals.” The search engines have learned that those businesses that have people talking about them on the social media are more relevant than those businesses that do not have anyone talking about them at all.
Some major search engines have even taken it upon themselves to develop social media systems for this purpose. Although many of these systems have failed, they have left the social signals up that relate to sites. This means that the businesses that get those social signals connected to their sites are businesses that have better rankings. The search engines trust themselves the most; therefore, if a person has the opportunity to get social signals from the system in question, then they should get those signals as soon as possible.
Let’s consider the example below:
Supposing a company has introduced an unusual new service that is not available anywhere else, and now wants to increase the awareness of it among Internet users.
It could combine social media and SEO marketing by submitting links on social bookmarking sites (Reddit, Care2, Digg, etc.) to an article on its website about the service.
If people “share” the link mentioned above, they will appear on more important pages of the bookmarking services as well as provide an increasing SEO benefit.
Some of these will be successful, while others are ignored. Either way, the submission of these links often helps a new web page become indexed in search engine results more rapidly.
Another way businesses and organizations combine these two forms of marketing is to operate their own blogs, MySpace pages, or micro-blogs.
On Twitter, for example, an interesting post may be “retweeted” by other users, enhancing its visibility and making the associated link appear on additional user pages across the site.
The marketing benefits can be magnified when social media content itself is optimized using SEO techniques.
A page on MySpace or Twitter, for example, will do more to promote a site if it uses keywords the correct way or has its own inbound links. A link posted to Digg or Reddit will help SEO efforts more if it has popular search keywords in its title.
Some methods to combine social media and SEO worked well in the past but have become less effective. Blog comment areas that have added the “Nofollow” tag to their links are of little use to SEO, although they can still produce direct traffic. The same goes for Wikipedia links and most sponsored blog postings.
Although social media based marketing requires some time and effort, one major advantage is that it doesn’t directly cost any money. It has also been know to combine fast results with an effective and attention-getting format. These benefits will probably ensure that marketers continue to develop new ways to promote businesses and enhance SEO using social media.
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