Written by | Leveraging Social Marketing For SEO |  |
| Social Bookmarking and Social Marketing Are Essential Social media marketing is proving to be an effective marketing strategy for Internet businesses. It is closely tied with search engine optimization because of its effect on search engine results. While there is often a discussion about whether SEO or social marketing is more important, there is finally a concurrence on the fact that both are necessary for a website to be effective. Websites cannot do without search engine optimization. At the same time, social marketing sites are also becoming an essential marketing tool for the success of a website. In fact, there’s a healthy overlap in the way both work, when used together. Social book marking is very popularly used and every time a marketer’s website or blog are book marked, an inbound link is made. Through these social bookmarking sites, users can rate or vote for the content, further enhancing its popularity and link building along with traffic – both indirect and direct.
Combining Social Marketing With SEO Effective search engine optimization is a must for all website owners. While many online marketers do try to follow various SEO strategies, some outsource the job. SEO mainly involves the usage of the right keywords at the right locations along with appropriate links so that the website is optimized to the search engines that spider it. This involves researching and identifying the right keywords. But the big task that online marketers face is using social marketing to achieve SEO effectively. Though this seems like a challenge, it is becoming necessary to be proficient at both. And it is not as difficult as it appears. For example, every time a blog or web page is book marked through social bookmarking tools by the website owner, it means more search engine optimization, traffic generation and more links. If a visitor votes on the content, blog or articles on a website, they provide the SEO and linking advantage. How Social Media Affects SEO There are three major ways in which social media can have a bearing on search engine optimization. These are: Links: when the social media marketing campaign is well designed and successful, it means a lot of high quality incoming links to the website. As far as search engine rankings go, inbound links play an important role. So it is obvious that social media marketing definitely improves search engine rankings. What makes these links special is that they are neither purchased nor forced – they all happen as a natural and voluntary process. Quality inbound links also occur when the marketer creates a profile on social networking sites. Reputation: the most popular social media sites are ranked high by the search engines. This must however be carefully managed as the marketer must take care to ensure that there are positive bookmarks for his products or business on social bookmarking sites like Digg, etc. Then it is easy to rank high in the search engine listings. But if there is something negative that people are talking about, the same thing could turn into bad publicity. It is up to the marketer to manage this in a way that there’s only good publicity. Page Rank On Social Marketing Websites Social media marketing sites are all part of the Web 2.0 platform and search engines are quite partial to these sites. So if the marketer gets a good page ranking on these sites, a good search engine ranking follows naturally. Social sites are excellent for high ranking even with a few links. For online business that are about to launch their websites, rather than wait for the search engines to index and rank them, they go ahead and upload a marketing video clip on YouTube or make a profile on sites like MySpace or Facebook and begin the link building process. This not only helps in huge traffic generation benefits but also gets the message out to large numbers of potential customers at minimal cost. All online marketers today must get accustomed to using social bookmarking websites. While discovering different ways to leverage these sites, it is also important to be familiar with the rules on each site. Spamming is taken very seriously on these sites where the content is user controlled. The main thing is to post quality content and be active on these sites to get the full advantage.
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Posts tagged social bookmarking
Social Marketing Part 2
Social Marketing Part 1
| Social Marketing – A Win Win Win Situation | |
| Why Social Marketing? At the rate at which the world wide web is changing, it is not surprising that internet marketers are going ‘social’ and recognizing the value of social networking sites like YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Going by the statistics on the amounts of unimaginable traffic these sites are experiencing, what Internet marketer wouldn’t want a huge share of it? In order to be in the race, these social media sites are very important and must be leveraged in a way that makes sense to the specific online business. These sites not only play a vital role in search engine optimization but also for high search engine rankings and therefore, traffic.
How The Concept Works One marketer talks about how his site turned up in the first page of Google’s search results for a particular key phrase even though the key phrase was not one of his targeted keywords. What had actually happened was one of his site’s visitors book marked that page on his site on Digg, which is a social bookmarking site. As a result of this, his website saw a massive rush of traffic. While this didn’t make a big difference in the sense of marketing, he soon realized how it made a difference to his search engine rankings – which means people do come to his website simply because his site still ranks at first place for that key phrase. So the moral of the story is, social media sites play a crucial role in search engine rankings and are not to be ignored. Happily, social bookmarking brings direct traffic from websites that are ranked among the top five for traffic. Almost all Internet users would have had a brush with social media by signing up with say, MySpace or Facebook. But it is not enough to create a profile and let it collect dust. It can be an effective means to build an entire business successfully by leveraging these sites by going about it in a planned and strategic manner, as many well-written social bookmarking guides will tell you. Social Media Tactics That Work It is not hard to become involved with social bookmark sites. There are easy to install and use bookmark tools, which allow the user to add the bookmark button to their pages and content. When these pages and content are visited by traffic, they are book marked and links are built. Most Internet marketers use the simple tactic of joining all these social media sites as they are all free to sign up with – which means they sign up with MySpace, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, Squidoo and the rest of it which are all part of the Web 2.0 platform. For the Internet marketer who wants to try social media marketing there are different methods depending on the kind of products and services offered and what outcome is expected. Here’s a quick overview of the ones that are the most popular vis-à-vis goals:
Social media marketing helps to form good relationships that in turn convert to business and referrals for the online marketer in addition to massive traffic generation. Granted that they do take a regular investment of time, but the benefits are of a long-term nature. The best benefit is building links, which is what keeps an online business flourishing. Posting good content on the sites suggested above has millions of viewers who in turn bookmark and share the information, thereby increasing the number of links to the site. Social bookmarking works for any size of business through a few simple strategies. The main thing to be cautious about is following the rules at these websites in order to be successful. To Be Continued… |