Today in a guest post from the wonderful Joseph Baker who is a wonderful friend to The Engaging Brand
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is both an art and science. When you design a site and optimize it, you have to make it flow and capture your visitors' attention, giving it an easy to use interface and developing an aesthetically pleasing layout. You also have to analyze search, visitor and other data to determine what areas you need to optimize for and which sections are better left alone. Due to this, gathering as much information as possible has become a key element in the quest for search engine results page (SERP) domination. Social media has quickly become a decently large part of the search algorithm pie and will likely continue to increase in size in the future, making it both an important aspect of SEO in its own right as well as a treasure trove of SEO-impacting information.
Proper campaign management includes not only analyzing how well a specific campaign is doing but also pulling in data from other avenues, such as SEO, to inform further advertising and targeting choices and tweak campaigns. If you can determine the browsing habits or referral search terms for website visitors and narrow down your data to those who bought your product, you can use that information to tweak your social media campaigns, targeting more specific groups using Facebook's PPC ad network or playing to a more niche audience in Twitter.
- Links and Traffic
Social interaction on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and Stumbleupon are important sources of data for search engines like Google and Bing. Every share and social promotion generates a new link to the content, boosting rankings. If you incorporate Facebook's platform with your website, your readers and customers gain the ability to quickly post your content to their profiles, giving you more exposure on social networks, driving valuable traffic and generating buzz and further links. Twitter users regularly tweet and retweet valuable links, generating viral responses to well-produced content. Reddit and Stumbleupon use social sharing as a way to separate the wheat from the chaff, allowing quality content to gain more exposure and even more links.
- Content is King
When Google rolled out the Panda update earlier in 2011, content rose to the top of the items used by the King of Mountain View to determine which sites were worthy to include in its court. As the value and quality of your content increases, the SEO value of it increases too. Increasing the value means providing information that people looking for your services would want. For instance, a heating and cooling company would be able to provide reliable information on weatherproofing one's home or ways to lower one's heating bill during the winter. Quality is largely a matter of the length of the content--longer is generally better--and the grammatical correctness. A blog post that looks like it was generated by a computer program will not make any sense and will, therefore, be ranked below an entry written by a knowledgeable human. Providing content that one of your customers would like to read and would enrich their life in some way is a sure fire way to increase your standing with Google as well.
Today in a guest post from the wonderful Joseph Baker, we look at the marketing implications of the holiday season. (Joe works at Professional Intern)
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