SEO and social media for beginners

I recently posted a ‘using Twitter’ guide for beginners. Here I take a look at using social media as a whole within an SEO campaign.

Search engine optimisation has changed dramatically over the past few years, but it is still based on creating relevant content and building up authority through your website and the links back to it from other websites.

The emphasis used to be on ‘on-page’ optimisation and collecting medium and high PR do follow backlinks.

On-page optimisation is still vital, but the emphasis of that content is now shaped by social media such as blogs, newsletters, forums, and videos and the integration of this media throughout relevant social networks.

And most of the backlinks you now procure to boost your site’s authority are from social media sites, many of which are procured because you have content to share.

A successful link campaign must include bloggers and online communities, where you try to get a vote in the form of a backink.

So what exactly is ‘social media’? For a start, it’s much more than Facebook and Twitter – here are the main areas you need to look at to start to structure a successful campaign.:

Social profiles

Facebook

Creating a Business Fan Page lets you make a page where customers or fans of your business can register as a ‘fan’ — allowing your updates to flow into their pages. You might also want to consider running local ads on Facebook.

Twitter

To make the most of Twitter for your business, you’ll need to use a few more advanced tools. This includes desktop and mobile Twitter clients like TweetDeck, Seesmic, and Tweetie. Desktop clients give you more flexibility and more control over your Twitter strategy than you’ll have on the Twitter website. Among other things, you’ll be able to pre-define searches (so that you can monitor certain keywords, including your business name) and group people you follow so that you can minimise the noise and focus on the real content.

There are many more sites you can use to create a social profile, including My Space, Bebo, LinkedIn, and Tagged– take a look at what’s out there to decide what’s best for you.

Blogs

If you’re confident that you can set up your own blog and integrate it within your website, you should do this. It does require a bit of technical knowledge, but it means that you can customise the blog to your website’s specifications, and add content relevant to selling your business around it, as well as integrating your main menu.

If you don’t feel you have the skills to do this, many hosting providers offer a 1 step easy setup for blogs that will automatically install WordPress for you. You can also setup a blog directly at WordPress.com (it’s easier to do, but you don’t have full control over the look and content of the blog as you would if it were integrated with your website).

Write about a subject you have expertise in and experience of, and that you’re interested in writing about. A blog requires a long term investment of time, and you don’t want to be stuck writing about things that don’t interest you.

Multimedia

Creating relevant and interesting multimedia (video, photos, audio) is a bit more complicated for many small businesses, but it can provide excellent social media marketing opportunities.

If you’re already posting videos to your blog, you can upload them to YouTube to reach a broader audience, and embed the video content in your blog posts. YouTube has also been adding more comprehensive activity updates for its users and has some powerful analytics tools available to help you evaluate the effectiveness of your video content.

Similarly, you could start a Flickr account for your business and post photos of your customers, products, staff etc. Flickr offers a place where people can share photos with others, but also has discussion groups, many focused on local markets, that offer additional opportunities for you to market your business.

Integration

Taking an overall view of what’s available, using it in the most relevant and effective way, and pulling it all together is the best way to take advantage of social media.

Integrating all your activity intensifies the effectiveness of your campaign. For example, if you’re posting a video on YouTube, blog about it on your company’s blog. Then, you can tweet about the blog posts on Twitter (which should be integrated with your Facebook account). This way, you’ve taken one piece of content and found a way to use it across multiple social networks, therefore increasing it’s audience and therefore impact.

You’ll also want to consider ways that you can optimise the distribution to multiple social networks at the same time. There are tools out there to help you do this. For example, Ping.fm lets you update multiple social networks all in one go.

Conclusion

Bear in mind that not all social networks will be the right choice for every business. You will need to do some research and decide which networks are best for your company, and find ways to combine those networks to use social networking to your best advantage within your campaign.

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