The question of whether you should introduce social media or SEO into your daily business model is no longer a question that should come up. If you are a business owner with a website, SEO and social media are must, period. Don’t worry about the conspiracy theorists that claim it doesn’t work; they are upset because they don’t understand the medium. Everyday more and more people and businesses turn to the internet to pretty much do everything. If you are not there, you might as well be nowhere.
There are no instructions or rules to how you should conduct your SEO or social media campaigns. Each campaign is vastly different and a cookie cutter approach just doesn’t work anymore. Years ago a business could launch a website and just sit back and wait for visitors, but in today’s market place there is lots of clutter and SEO allows websites to pry their way through the clutter in order to be visible. SEO and social media are two very different efforts but complement each other in a great way. Here is a simple break down of each:
1. SEO: Search engine optimization works a lot like a magnet. Basically it is a form of inbound marketing. Search engines cannot think, at least yet. They read so if certain keywords and phrases don’t exist on your website search engines cannot know that you offer what that specific visitor just searched for. SEO is proactive marketing and is broken up into two phases. Once you have a well optimized website you need a catalyst to get your website to climb through all the clutter and be visible. By launching many different efforts such as online PR and article marketing you can quickly add power and life to your website along with creating new path ways for others to find your website. It is important to have many different links pointing towards your website online. The more links pointing at you the more possibilities of a visitor finding your website.
2. Social Media: Social media is something many companies are still scared of. It is new and unknown and that scares many corporate executives and business owners who like to do things the old fashioned way. Social media is just one giant online networking event. You can buy a ticket and show up and not talk to anyone if you don’t want to. If you start communicating with certain people around you can quickly build some relationships. As these relationships grow in quantity so does your branding and website visitors.
