How a Killer Social Media Strategy Can Rock Your SEO Efforts

Internet Marketing is now as important (if not more so) than offline marketing programs and many businesses are struggling to understand and incorporate the various elements of integrated marketing – from paid advertising to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to Social Media. Make no mistake: online marketing is here to stay and leading businesses small and large are jumping onto the social media bandwagon in a huge way. Not only are they using this channel to raise visibility, build relationships and drive sales, they are also tying social media with their SEO efforts to make online marketing strategies as powerful as possible.

There are many perceptions (and misperceptions) of SMM or Social Media Marketing so it’s helpful to get a few things straight right away. First, any good social media marketer or blogger will tell you that the key to acquiring a good search engine ranking is to target a popular niche market. Nothing can sink your social media campaign faster than acquiring hordes of followers that have absolutely no interest in your services. So target carefully and build accordingly.

This is where your SEO article writing and posting plays such a crucial role! By using keyword heavy terms related to your target niche, you can lure potential clients into accessing your website. Strong blog entries can even convince potential clients/customers to buy from you. Bu remember: your goal should be to create a relationship with the user before pushing your services or product at them. Constant promotion is boring and turns people off. Remember: you want engagement, one of the great benefits of social media is the potential for interaction. Use it.

Social media marketing is perhaps one of the best ways to maintain the fine balance between the consumer and yourself and creating leads. Most search engines look for social media interaction more carefully when they index pages. This includes checking how often blogs are updated, whether your site has engaging content and if there is steady interaction with visitors. If you pass on all of these accounts then your website’s position should improve (although real SEO usually involves other steps).

Social media marketing can also increase back links to your site which can help your SEO efforts enormously. The best way to do that? Blogs, and lots of them. Writing search engine optimized content for your service can help enhance its visibility online.

There are lots of ways to do this. An interesting Twitter or Facebook post can be ‘retweeted’ or forwarded by users who found it worth their while. If you want more and more users to read your ‘words of wisdom’ you can use popular keywords to make them click on your links.

Why/how does Twitter help with SEO? Although Twitter is a social media tool meant to create community and relationships, it does have an SEO value. For example, Twitter can affect positively your Alexa rankings by sending visitors to your pages (through links you include in your tweets). Usage data is a sign of quality for Google and all the other search engines. If you can make people come to your site via Twitter, then this is an SEO advantage you cannot afford to miss.

Social media marketing can be tuned to cater to all tastes, whether eccentric or otherwise. Suppose you have a product or service that is a bit above the norm and want to advertise its ‘unique’ benefits online. What do you do? Combining your social media and SEO marketing strategy you can submit links to bookmarking sites such as Reddit, Care2, Dig etc. Attaching a bookmark to one of their articles can help you accumulate that extremely crucial buyer list. There are tons of options and no set rules so feel free to experiment to see what works best for you and your business.

So when you’re considering the various pieces of an integrated marketing campaign, don’t forget to tie in social media when you’re developing your SEO strategy. If you do it right, they’ll work together hand-in-glove to deliver customers (and results).