The Social Media Revolution And SEO

The Social Media Revolution And SEO

Author: Nicholas James

There´s an interesting offshoot to the whole SEO and internet marketing industry that has become big in the relatively short time it has existed. This latest development is referred to as SMO, or Social Media Optimisation.

Social media is the catch-all term for a collection of networks and websites within a bracket that has been labeled Web 2.0.

This has opened up a whole new avenue for website marketing. If you are regularly providing valuable and informative content and it is being successfully promoted through various social media sites and niche networks, it can bring an enormous amount of traffic into your website.

But what is Web 2.0?

Allow me to explain. Basically Web 2.0 is an umbrella phrase referring to a second generation of web applications and communities that are largely driven by user generated content. For example, Facebook and Youtube, probably the two most popular websites doing the rounds at present, are both Web 2.0 applications where the end-user provides the content.

But though these may be the most celebrated, or widely known at least, they are certainly not it as regards to social media. There are a multitude of social networks scattered out like small seaports across the vast ocean that is the internet, covering practically ever niche you could hope to imagine and quite a few you probably wouldn´t want to. This has moved website promotion away from a sole reliance upon search engine positioning.

And it doesn´t end there. You´ve probably heard of blogs and the wonderful way they´ve revolutionised the internet in recent times.

The weblog has become more than just an account of your day to day, week by week activities. They´ve come a long way indeed. In the past ten years (when the term weblog was first coined) blogs have moved on from what essentially were nothing more than a list of favourite links; to the more popular diary format; right up to the present day where they are a source of journalism for the masses. A platform from which debate, information and conjecture can be passed freely around the realms of cyberspace.

This holds yet another advantage, in that if you have great content and a regular flow of visitors coming to check you out, it can build lots and lots of naturally formed backlinks. Plenty of links pointing at your website are a good thing. They mark you out as an authority site and that´s what Google likes to see.

And finally there is the fact that a regular input of fresh content shows Google that you are serious about your website. It will increase the frequency with which it gets crawled as Google and their search engine brethren value sites updated on a perpetual basis over those that sit stagnant and never changing. As this is one of the factors included in the Google algorithm it can see your efforts rewarded in the search engine rankings.

In conclusion, social media and social media optimisation are internet marketing buzzwords that have blown up into an entire sub-industry, and it would seem they´re in no immediate hurry to go away.