Why Social Media Optimization is a Vital Component of your SEO Campaign

Social media optimization (SMO) is a critical component of your SEO campaign. Not so long ago, social networking sites were nothing more than oddities.  Today, the command enormous rankings with authority from search engines. Your search engine position is very vulnerable to your competitors if you are not capitalizing on social media to increase your exposure and communicate to your target audience.

So, what is the influence of social media optimization on search marketing?

Search marketing directly depends on the exposure in the search engines to generate traffic. For quite some time, site development and generation of links pointing to your site were all you needed to gain exposure.  While both are still important today, SMO has however tilted the landscape of search marketing.

There was a time when Google maintained several platforms for videos, blogs, news and identical types of “social content”. Each of these operated as independent search engine with its own set of natural listings. However, the listing from each platform has recently been integrated into a system called Universal Search. Other search engines like Yahoo and Bing have equally adopted a similar system.

This means that videos, blogs and news have all been integrated into the natural listings, setting many sites to the first page. This explains why social media optimization has become an important piece search engine optimization.

Increased rankings authority given to social networking sites like facebook, Twitter and others have also influenced search marketing. SMO upholds your current natural listing while assisting you to gain even more search exposure. You can capture a greater number of organic positions by using videos, blogs and social media sites.

Rules of engagement during a social media optimization campaign:
There are a number of rules of engagement that you need to appreciate before launching your SMO campaign. Ignoring them can make your campaign far less effective.

i. Begin by doing everything you can to get your audience to link to your site.  Integrating your blogs is a great idea because this will make it possible to update your content over time while attracting loyal readers.  Install a plug-in button and encourage your followers to tag, bookmark and “Tweet” your blog posts.

ii. Link generously as a resource for your visitors. SMO has a lot to do with helping others accomplish their goals. With your audience engaged, help them find resources that they need by linking to them.  Ultimately, your site will be considered a resource hub, which will help you attract in coming links. This is an important ingredient in your SEO campaign.

iii. Be able to identify your target market. SMO depends greatly on connections that you establish with your niche community. You have to adequately target them in order to generate content and get them engaged.

iv. Incorporate tracking tool to monitor and establish the success of your SMO campaign. Follow up mentions of your site and business by tracking the progress of your site in the organic listings for your main keywords. Generate linking reports indicating incoming links pointing to your domain and particular pages. Following your metrics is important in order to establish the effectiveness of your SMO campaign.

Each element of SMO campaign has some connection with SEO. Continuous content creation, tagging and book marking, attracting in coming links by being resource for your followers- are all critical to sending your site higher in the search engine listings. Social media optimization puts in place a new set of tools necessary to realize the same objective as SEO: more exposure on search engines. Knowing how to use these tools effectively is the main challenge.