Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves gaining visibility to your site naturally not using paid services. So the more people visit your site, the higher ranked you become and vice versa. The goal of SEO is to get your site at the top of search results. You can do this by picking the right search terms and keywords and then optimizing your site to be more search friendly. You can take SEO a step further and use these techniques in social media but getting your blogs and profiles to show up in search queries. This can be tremendous in exposing your site/s to the world and gaining the notoriety you want.
Dont get cocky just yet. Even though there is 400 million users on Facebook doesnt mean they will all see your social media content in searches. About 70% of that are active users and not all are using it to search for info that can lead to your company. Also, nothing beats the complex algorithms of the web and search engines but performing the proper steps could get that added push you need to get your content out there and more visible.
Remember that all of your target audience may not be on social media, especially if your a B2B company. Social media still is premature with ecommerce, forms, and other features full fledged websites have. To be found, you have to do well on search engines. The tricks and tools used to find good search terms and optimize pages transfer to social media, relatively tweets and blogs. SEO is essential but not sufficient in your site visibility compared to the friends family fans and followers you have. Remember your chasing income. There are tons of search engines but focus on the main 3; google, yahoo, bing. Hone your ste search engine based on your audience targeted. For example, google has close to 80% of the market share for B2b purchasing. Yahoo users tend to be older then google users and more likely female. Bing attracts more males and people 45 or older.
Your site or social media profile needs to appear within the top 10 positions on page 1 of the search results for good visibility. How many times have you gone past page one when searching for something? Most people go to the top 2 links but do check the top 10 on that page 1. The average length of a search query has increased over the years. The longer the search query, the more likely they are converted to your site. Start off with 25-30 search terms that can be distributed among different paths of your website. Ask customers, friends, fans, and family what they would search for when looking for your products or similar ones. Include all industry-specific jargon you can come up with. Local companies should integrate location into their search terms. Digital point, google insights and google keyowrd tool can help you with other keywords.
Remember, in order to optimize social media into SEO your content needs to stay relevant, updated and making sure your presence is easy to find in search engines.
Paper, rock, scissors,
Randall
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Now that you have created a social media policy, a plan of action and have taken the necessary steps in protecting your social media investment, it is time to use helpful tools that will keep your site relevant and you up to date with the latest trends. You need to take advantage of the online resources to stay current with social media. A way to do this is to subscribe to feeds about social marketing from one or more marketing blogs or news services. For instance I subscribe to Social Media Examiner, SEO Hacker, Guorilla Media, and various marketing and social media groups on Linkedin. I have daily and weekly feeds that come to me that keeps me up to date with the latest in social media. This gives me all the information I need in one place and controls the frequency of delivery.
