SEO Articles

There is an interesting offshoot of search engine optimisation and internet marketing that has gone on to become extremely popular in its relatively short lifetime. A term has been coined for this new development and that is SMO, or Social Media Optimisation.

Social media refers to a particular collection of sites and networks within the realm of what has been labelled Web 2.0.

"Web two-point-what?” I hear you cry.

Well if this term is new to you then let me explain a little further. Basically Web 2.0 refers to a second generation of web applications and communities that are largely driven by user generated content. Two of the most popular of these sites being Facebook and Youtube.

But though these may be the most celebrated, or widely known at least, they are certainly not the be-all and end-all of 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 opened up a wealth of new opportunities for the promotion and marketing of websites, away from the reliance upon search engine positioning.

But that is not all. There is a small thing called the blog, which you may have heard of, a wonderful device that has revolutionised the internet in recent times.

You might think of the blog (weblog) as being just an account of your day to day, week by week activities, but it can be a lot more than that. Blogs have come a long way in the past ten years (when the term weblog was first coined), from what essentially was nothing more than a list of favourite links, to the more popular diary format, right up to present day where it has become a source of journalism for the masses; where opinion, information, conjecture and debate are thrown freely about cyberspace with reckless abandon.

This has opened up a whole new avenue for the marketing of your website. 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.

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. As we all know, plenty of links pointing into your site are a good thing. They mark you out as an authority site and that's what Google likes to see.

"But I run a small restaurant, I only want a website to promote the business. How's a blog going to help me?”

Well not only can you tell people of how the business is going and talk up your successes, but you can keep them abreast of upcoming promotions and local events. And you're running a restaurant after all, so provide cooking tips and recipes. Think outside of the box, a blog can be as successful as you make it.

And finally there is also the fact that you'll have fresh, new content regularly flowing into your website, which in turn impacts on your search rankings, as Google and their search engine brethren value regularly updated sites over those that sit stagnant and unchanging, and reward them for their efforts in the search engine rankings.

Social media and social media optimisation have become the buzzwords of late in internet marketing circles, and it doesn't look as though they're about to go away any time soon.

Be sure to tune into Quiddity! our SEO Blog, for further tips and opinions on social media, blogging, and of course SEO.