Social Media

SEO Lesson 5

By WebPaws.com

Over the past several years, the rate of change in social media and search has changed the way SEO is applied to business websites to provide a high level of reach to their targeted audience. Standard website content now not only needs to be unique and useful but also more sociable. Integrating your content into the social networks will create more opportunities for expanding your content into the ever changing search indexes.

People gravitate towards simplicity and ease-of-use; hence computer web searches have surpassed written text research by over 200%. People are spending much more time on the Web creating and contributing to searchable content as well as searching for content. This new content comes in the form of blogs, comments, reviews, ratings, recommendations, etc. – all which enhances existing content with additional social context. This increased interaction with existing and new content has made social media visibility very important to search for various organizations, companies, brands, etc.

The white-hat methodology for optimizing desired search engine results or natural search visibility now needs to include social media visibility. You can’t buy SEO like in SEM (pay-per-click [PPC] ads like Google AdWords), but you can hire an SEO specialist to help your website earn its new improved rankings through hard work in XHTML/CSS, link-backs, visibility, proper content and placement, etc. SEO is not only based on site-side optimization, but also on link equity, or authority (authority is Google’s dominate criteria in its search engine algorithm). Social equity is also earned attention which also requires a lot of hard work and time in generating opportunities. While companies can advertise within social networks, the real social equity is getting talked about and engaging in valuable dialogue with consumers. This requires a different strategy than traditional SEO approaches to advertising and media to create this opportunity.

Social Equity

Social equity is an earned commodity, which like in traditional SEO, takes time to propagate through the search community, getting high rankings in the search indexes requires the proper management of many attributes of a webpage or other web content.  Combining the equity of social media visibility with that of natural search visibility will yield a much higher return in brand targeted SERPs (Search Engine Result pages).  As the search engines modify their search algorithms to incorporate social media it is very important to include social media into your internet marketing plan. Obvious tasks to make your business more social are to do the following:

1. create branded social media accounts in several mediums
1. twitter
2. facebook
3. YouTube
4. and others… depending on the content and media you will be able to propagate into these networks
2. add content into these networks, company info, website links and standard company content about your products, services, people, uniqueness to the
   market, etceteras
3. manage these accounts, adding/approving friends, monitoring comments, interacting with your fans or followers on a daily or frequent basis
4. integrate these accounts into your main-stream website including the addition of allowing pieces of your content, pages, applications, etc. to be posted or talked about on other social networks.

To actually see positive results on a large scale can take at least 6 weeks depending on the frequency of social activities, the ability to tie these into your main site to provide back-links to those using your content in a social environment and targeting the proper audience to become social in that will accept your brand/message/service into their networks.  Rewarding your social friends will help propagate your messages and increase the possible social interactions.  WebPaws.com can help your business create a social equity plan to improve your website pull in natural search – social media visibility.