Social Media Optimization; a Better Approach

SEO, to be honest, is not the only best way to advertise or to generate leads with good conversion. SEO is essential even now a days but It does lacks something, perhaps world has evolved? Today, you would see many ways of advertisement but do you notice the vital role of social media? To cover up SEO lacking and to benefit from social media, Social Media Optimization is the answer.

What is Social Media Optimization?

Like Search engine optimization, Social Media Optimization is a way to effectively advertise your product but via social media. There are some differences between them. Social Media Optimization is more user concentric where as SEO, mostly, focuses Search Engines. SEO relies on search engines AI whereas Social Media Optimization makes use of people who trust your services. Both have some benefits.

Social Media Optimization

What Social Media Optimization does but SEO doesn’t

We all say that internet is not a safe place and you don’t believe what you see! Suppose yours is a start-up, imagine how much time will it take you to establish trust in market provided you get enough hits via search engine from where you can get conversions? Basic purpose of SEO is to make sure that more and more people visit your site. On above note, SEO works great for blogs and websites who get paid just because you visited them.

This is exactly where social media hops in. Lets take an example of a social person, who is your satisfied customer, over facebook. Most probably that person will recommend your services to his friends and family and by liking your page and subscribing to your future updates. When someone in your friend list shares something over social media, you will consider it for once since it is not being recommended by an search engine AI(Artificial Intelligence) but a human being whom you know. Basically, its human nature to trust people you know at least more than an AI.

An Ideal Approach of Social Media Optimization

First and most important step is to make your presence on, at least, on popular social networks. Now, you have to make your presence effective as well as active. You can hire someone for your work still you will be required to spend time to show that your people are active and mean business. Your Social Media presence should stick to objectives since regular updates over social media will be seen by lots of people who are following you and if you are good at broadcasting, chances are you will get good number of shares.

Social Media optimization doesn’t restricts you to online networks. Offline or your live daily contacts are much important. You don’t just have to sit on your working table 24/7. You must spread the word in your offline social circles as well – care to visit coffee shop?.

Is SEO dead?

Answer is no, at least not for now. You, yourself, wouldn’t like to miss the perk you get from search engines neither it is recommended. A better way is to work simultaneously with Social Media Optimization as well as Search Engine Optimization. However, you need to take care while doing search engine optimization. Make sure that SEO doesn’t affect visitor/user point of view about your page. Social Media Optimization is a better approach than search engine optimization but it is not recommended without SEO so mid way is the better way.  

SEO basics; Starting from the ground

Many professionals or site owners don't understand the importance of learning SEO basics. Learning SEO basics is extremely beneficial for any website owner or a professional of related field. Even if you hire someone else for search engine optimization, at some point in future you will need at-least the basic know how of SEO. Importance of learning and implementing SEO basics was nicely put in words by Carolyn Shelby (Director of SEO, Chicago Tribune). "Skipping the basics and spending all your time and money on social and 'fancy stuff' is the same as skipping brushing your teeth and showering, but buying white strips and wearing expensive cologne," Shelby stated. By basics, she referred to SEO basics.

What are SEO Basics?

SEO basics is useful knowledge about search engines as well as your prospective visitors. You can use this knowledge to your benefit. How do search engine generate a list for any search query? How can you maintain balance between SEO and visitor's priorities? How famous search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, maintain ranking of websites?

Understanding the SEO basics can give you lots of benefits

Answers of above questions will give you a list of SEO basics. Once you have basic knowledge, you can innovate according to your needs.

Learning the SEO Basics!

Concept of SEO

Many people misuse the concept of SEO and they interpret SEO in wrong terms such as tricking the search engines. On the contrary, SEO is to provide a great experience to your visitors. Secondly, SEO maintains communication with search engines so they can get only relevant visitors to your site. A visitor looking for cake but landing on site of coffee shop will make no sense and certainly of no use to both sides.

How search engines rank a website?

Search engines rank websites by the factor of relevancy. Your foundation of SEO is content you offer on your website. More you remain relevant and on-topic, higher your site will be graded in search engines.

Performance, navigation and infrastructure of your site is very important. Is your site doing what it is supposed to do?And is it fast enough to handle traffic? Will visitor be at peace while navigating your site? Answer these questions and you will be able to make yourself a to-do check list. Links from sites with good reputation will grade you higher in the list.

User experience basically relates to all the factors above.

If you can increase your rating by good practices then your site can also be degraded due to some bad practices. Bad practices include misuse of keywords and buying links resulting in bad user experience. Overusing the keywords will certainly put of the search engines. Bad user experience can also result from various other practices such as site flooding with ads.

Some Good Practices

Following SEO basics are some good practices of professionals:

Make sure your website is optimized well enough for mobile computing due to steep increase in usage of internet on smart phones and tablet PC's. Social media has become the major source of advertisement and if you create links with your social media presence, you will definitely note an increase in relevant traffic. More relevant traffic means more conversions.

Some SEO basics are only handy if you are about to start your presence on WWW but learning them won’t hurt and they may help you in future. You will greatly benefit if your domain name includes your keyword. Use a sub directory rather than using a sub-domain, it will help search engine spiders.

If you have a basic know-how of SEO, you can try different things which may work for your website better rather than practicing what others are doing.

SEO Tips; Every tip is not to be practiced on your website

SEO can be hectic but absolutely necessary for any start-up. For layman understanding, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Basically, you tweak your website to make it Search Engine friendly. Before you run back to 'Google' SEO tips, there are certain things you need to know.

Which SEO tips to follow

If you surf Search Engine results then you will realize that there is so much to choose from. Bigger the menu, more difficult becomes the choice. If you analyze closely, most of the websites are implementing almost same thumb rules in different ways. This is only because no two sites are same.

Never follow SEO tips only because they worked for some other site. You do need to weigh your competition but never follow them or copy their ideas. If you do, why do you think any customer would come to your site when you have nothing distinct. On many places you will find the so-called useful SEO tips and pointless jargon but lesser will give you the concept behind Search Engine Optimization.

If you get the concept, you can solve problems by yourself.

Some Useful SEO tips

Here are some general SEO tips which are handy for every site:

SEO Tips that works for all sites and blogs

First and most important thing, your website needs to be SEO friendly but your priority must be humans. Many tend to forget this when doing SEO and the results they get don’t last long enough due to poor quality. Sure enough, customers or whatever traffic you get must be satisfied with your site.

Local directories and listings tend to play important role in finding you potential customers. Register with major directories like Google Plus Local or Yahoo directories followed by local business or government listings.

 Some SEO tips will help you optimize your website for Search Engines as well as humans.

Navigation in a site is important for human as well as search engine. Good navigation links will allow your customers to easily explore your website. Same goes for a search engine; search engine crawlers crawl your links more or less in the same way.

You would agree that Social Media has created hype in advertisement industry since people spend more and more time on social media. This is exactly why your site needs a presence in social media. Moreover, social media presence will generate you more business via referrals.

You need to make your website active but also make sure that the content is on-topic so that people will come back again. Make sure that you publish this content on your website and link it with your local listings presence as well as social media presence. Most SEO tips you find don't consider this little factor but it does play an important role in generating you potential traffic.

Internet usage on mobile is increasing day by day so you can step ahead of your competitors now. Remember this SEO tip doesn't mean that you totally optimize your mobile pages for Search Engines.

These were some of the basic SEO tips. If you get the logic behind these SEO tips then you can easily implement good SEO on your website using any of the SEO tools available in market. You can even hire someone to do SEO for you and these SEO tips will help you to monitor the work.