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Posts tagged SMO
Link Building: Social Media vs Long Tail Marketing
Apr 25th
How do people find new websites? One way is that people receive an email from a friend who uses and recommends the website. Another way is that people could find that website by searching on Google. Finally, people could find out about the website on social media!
Now this post is about link building or search engine optimization, so what’s the point you would say. Let me start by saying that it is known that backlinks are the main factor behind the page rank. Also, it is often said that the best way to have a lot of backlinks is to create great content. Of course, nobody ever came up with a clear definition of what makes content to be great, but one thing is sure: if you don’t have enough backlinks to your page, that page will probably not make it to the top of Google for main keywords.
Ahah! Here lies the dilemma: from one hand, pages with great content will not be shown on top of search engines unless they have backlinks. On the other hand, pages need to be found to have a chance to be linked to. Therefore, someone who bases his marketing campaign solely on search engine optimization will have to adopt long tail marketing techniques so his pages could have top position only through internal page optimization and hope receiving backlinks from those who search for those long tail keywords. Another way of saying would be that all the good keywords are already taking by websites who have build a strong backlink network. Newcomers will have to find a niche and stay there.
Well, there is another option: social media marketing. If the point with search engine optimization is to get people visit your website, then what difference does it make to have them find you out through Google or Twitter? What do you prefer? Talking to people on Twitter to get them visit your website or asking some blogger to link to your website?
SMO More Important Than SEO?
Nov 4th
Social media optimization is no longer support for SEO; it is now recognized as a marketing technique apart. With almost as much people using Facebook than Google, social media becomes indeed an important tool in the hands of marketers. However, to reach its full potential, social media needs to be used in a different way than search engines.
SEO is inherently static: once a page is optimized, searched and read, there is nothing else left to gain for the marketer. On the other hand, social media is dynamic tool, i.e. marketer and customers are in ongoing and interactive contact. By integrating social media in marketing strategy, managers can do more than create a Facebook page and support brand awareness.
By using Facebook or Twitter to converse with their customers, firms will profit from the viral nature of social media. Engaging the right people on social media will therefore result of spreading dialogue that marketers have initiated. For example, if someone likes a video advertising about your product, he or she could post the video on his Facebook wall. This will have a viral effect as that person’s friends might do the same or comment about the video. Even if it is less obvious, the same principle holds for other kind of dialogues. Of course, things will not happen in the same way than for video advertising, but there will be a form of word out effect about your product or company.
The great thing about social media is that a lot of things can be measured from messages that are exchanged on the platform. This is because traces are left every time something is said on the platform, especially for ones that are broadcast-based like Twitter. I think that social media optimization is only in a stage of infancy and that great tools and techniques are to be developed to maximize ROI.
SMO Helps SEO
Sep 16th
Of course, the most important aspects in search engine optimization is link building. Link building capability differentiates SEO experts from the masses. Link exchanging leads to SEO score leaks, so I do not recommend this tactic. Directories are also recognized by major search engines and end up being wasted effort. On the other hand, social media can be used as an interesting tool for link building. The good thing is that if the links that you have posted are posted again or quoted by someone else, then you have extra SEO points because there will be more links. In this regard, social media can be used to unleash the power of SMO in building links.
The other aspect is about traffic. SEO is about generating leads, that is have people that are looking for something end up at your website. Well, social media can be very useful to have word of mouth effect or viral marketing work for you. In this sense, SEO and SMO work in parallel to get the same result: more traffic.
When it comes to social media optimization, keywords are as important as in search engine optimization. Real-time search engines like oneriot.com are getting increasing attention. FriendFeed got bought by Facebook because of its real-time search capability. Google is also known to be working on real-time search. This means that for social media optimization experts, keywords must be carefully chosen according to the platform that is being used and the way search engines deal with indexing community generated content.