Marketing strategies that have worked effectively with a focus on traditional SEO services are being eclipsed by campaigns that focus on optimizing the social media network. The SEO expert of today should not allow themselves to fall behind on the latest results on social media that is starting to take over traditional SEO. Test results strongly indicate that it is in some cases more powerful than traditional SEO.
Google+ indicates that social recommendations and website marketing are equally as effective as the traditional SEO. Rand Fishkin discovered that social proof is acknowledged by Google where their powerful socially-oriented media network of links helps to rank them high. Two representatives from Bing and Google agree that their data also indicates that their search engines are geared towards noting how many people are followed and how many follow. The regularity of Twitter tweets is also noted as an important ranking activity.
On Facebook links that are marked as Everyone are also watched to see how often they are clicked. When content is shared on these sites the search engines assign a preference to these sites the more frequently the content is shared. These observations are growing in frequency and importance for the sites. The search engines are looking for connections to be made via the existing possibilities that have been created to do this.
The SEOMoz’s 2011 Search Engine Factors Ranking report had over 100 experts in SEO and social media stating that page level and domain level socially-oriented site contributions would have a stronger effect on rankings by search engines than traditional SEO. Content sharing on Facebook fan pages has a strong influence in search engine rankings according to Tampa SEO. Additionally, the Twitter Search Engine on Bing tool is where one can search tweets in real time in Bing. Retweets tend to increase traffic and rankings for a keyword that didn’t rank on the first tweet.
Commenting on blogs helps to create more visitors as well as. The comments on blogs must be relevant to the content of the post. Message boards are still producing results if messages are left. They help to drive more traffic to the commenter’s website.
There are two other effective strategies for increasing traffic and rank. Google local search is another free site for bringing in more traffic. Businesses can include their company information which includes videos, images, address, phone numbers and testimonials. It is recommended that all the information be provided to take full advantage of this function. Additionally, writing as a guest blogger brings in more traffic as well as reinforcing the brand.
The video site You Tube should be leveraged and many do this by way of their own channel. Creating a series of videos about a product or service allows one to develop a linking system to their blog. You Tube brings in millions of visitors to some videos yearly because most people are always drawn to a video first over text. Clicking on a video provides spontaneous information that requires very little concentration by the individual.
The SEO expert must keep up with the times and make a mental note of what the current social media test results are indicating. As stated by Matt Cutts in Pubcon 2010 the five main influencers will be mobile web, local search, social, blended results for the results in search engines and HTML5.