Social Media Marketing – What is it & who needs it

By now there are a few sites that you should have heard of, Craigslist, Digg, YouTube and MySpace – these are just a few of the social media sites and there are quite a few more. Social media sites are sites that people can go to congregate to share pictures, ideas, videos and more. I know it sounds like just about every other site out there but there is a difference and that difference is in the level of interaction. You see social marketing sites encourage involvement and promote a sense of community

Social media can be used for more things than sharing your holiday pictures or goofy videos. Social media sites can be used to find new employees or perhaps a new love interest or even find an old one. Social media can be used to bring in a whole new level of collaboration when joining in with a similarly minded community.

Perhaps one of the best things that social media sites can be used for is reputation management. Let’s say that some person has printed some negative comments about your company and those pages rank highly in the search engines, this is clearly not a good thing for your business. Creating social media accounts can certainly help in some cases.

You see due to the high level of traffic and linking to these social media sites, some of these sites can rank quite highly within the search engines. Given the power of these networks you should be able to create your company pages that will soon out rank those negative comment pages, forcing them to fall in the SERPS and hopefully, right off of page 1. Of course you would need to set up several profiles to push those negative comments off of page 1.

Here are a few of the more popular ones.

Amazon
Craigslist
Facebook
Flickr
Judy's Book
LinkedIn
MySpace
Newsvine
Technorati
Yahoo Answers
Yelp
YouTube

What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization (or optimisation depending upon which side of the pond you are on) and when done properly, is nothing more than accurately communicating to the search engines what any given page is about. Granted there are ways to artificially increase the “illusion” of what a page is about but that would go against the notion of “accuracy”.

Think about what each page is about and try to find the best keyword to describe the topic of each page and use those keywords in the TITLE tag.

Again, keeping in mind what the topic of the pages are about, write an accurate description for each page, keeping all hype slogans out, save that for the “on page” copy as search engines don’t care if you think your page is the “best”, “fastest”, “newest” or “cheapest”.

While most of the search engines no longer give a rat’s ass about KEYWORDS, some still do use them so for the ones that still do make sure that you only use words that are actually on your page within the KEYWORD tag.

There are some other things you can do to help convey to the search engines what your site and pages are about such as FORMATTING and LINKING but, if you start with the above mentioned you will be well on your way to accurately communicating with the search engines.