Social Marketing Meets Search Engine Optimization
By Mark Kimathi
Social Media Marketing (SMM) is simply a means to engage your prospect in a more relational non-official manner while attracting link popularity as you pepper the internet with your site’’s URL.
Thus far, it seems SMM and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) only meet at link popularity, but there is more. There are social sites that are being able to drive direct SE (Search Engine) traffic while still giving the usual social traffic as well as the link love that is so badly needed in the SEO. These sites are not only high in link popularity but they also highly rank within SEs by themselves. Sites like Squidoo, HubPages, ClipMarks and others will literally rank within the first pages of SEs for even fairly competitive terms in a matter of days.
Now, if you have been in internet marketing for at least 3 months that last statement should have taken you aback. In old school SEO, it took even a week just to get indexed. This basically means that from that point on, SE know that your site exists and have included it in their database. It would then take more weeks just to get listed in the SERP. And of course they will first place your site so deep in the list you will even have a problem locating it yourself. Then slowly your pages will graduate moving up in the SERP list as they attain increasing link popularity.
This process may take you a couple of months before you can see your site in the first pages of the SEs for your targeted keyword. All this time you will be receiving zero or very little traffic. A ranking position below the third page of SE listings will rarely get you any appreciable amounts of traffic.
But with some social sites this process happens in a matter of a day. You post your content and the next day you will literally find your content listed within the first pages of SEs attracting hordes of traffic. You actually get stumped the first time this happens to you if you have been marketing the old way. There is an explanation to this phenomenon.
SEs are always looking for new content to include in their results. On the other hand social sites are always churning out new content as their users blog, comment and update their profiles. So SEs camp out on these sites and slurp up the new content as it comes, indexes it and ranks it ASAP.
Just think about it, by tomorrow, today’’s blog post in a social site like Xanga will be stale. So the SEs need to quickly rank this content so it can be found today. This is why they expedite the process.
Unfortunately there is a notable disadvantage with these fast SE ranking. There had to be, this is already too good to be true. With such fast ranking one could literally make truckloads of cash. The disadvantage is that these ranking go as fast as they come and here is why.
Remember that blog post at Xanga that got quickly ranked, tomorrow it is stale news. Tomorrow we will be interested with what’’s new then. So the SEs quickly reduces the value to that blog post as it ranks newer post higher. Usually such content will drop down the SERP like a stone after a few days. But for those that have their SEO basics right there are ways to susutain these ranking at those high levels.
About The Author
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