SEO & Social Media

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When people approach the Internet and work toward maximizing exposure and other issues, the focus is often on number of hits, place in searches and other issues but one cannot forget the Facebook page that someone likes and never looks blog 2at again.  The like does not result in that user going to the company’s website or further engaging with the firm or brand.  Use of the Internet and social media has progressed to the point that people are recognizing that there is a finite amount of information and positive consequences related to how adept web designers are at ensuring that the website will be first viewed in web searches and other Search Engine Optimization (SEO) goals.  Utilizing social media and the Internet in general has become more sophisticated and real efficacy requires discernment in the type of traffic companies wish to bring to their websites and how this impacts the overall branding of the company or product.  Conversely, there are realities that require that SEO is an integral component of any firm’s advertising and marketing strategy because more than 60% of users only click on the first search engine results page (SERP) and fewer than 10% of users click on results beyond page three (Malaga 2008).  From the standpoint of social media, the webpage that social media should point to is the most important component of the equation.  It is the webpage that will be linked to even if a customer is accessing the company from Twitter or Facebook.

What is true for the webpage is also applicable to social media.  Research to determine the way the market appears to be structured and the keywords that bring up competitors or ancillary businesses help inform the best keywords for a company or industry.  Site structure should be based on not only the way the company wishes to be viewed but what will differentiate it specifically in Internet searches, page titles, tag lines, URLs that are easy to search, and simple navigation assisted by an adequate site map (Kruger 2012).  Content is important because it not only helps users navigate a page but is what the search engines will connect to consequently unity in images and text are important.  A good story is more important in selling and branding than one might believe in terms of rates and rankings (Pozin 2014).

Additionally, inbound links, people who come to the site from another, are exceedingly important because this is the word of mouth recommendation via the Internet (Kruger 2012).

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ilyapozin/2014/09/15/8-biggest-mistakes-in-hiring-an-seo-company/

This is similar to product reviews or the number of transactions conducted by a third party vendor on Wal-Mart or Amazon.  People feel safer taking the “word” of a book vendor about the condition of the item if the company has had over ten thousand transactions with Amazon versus another company with only a few hundred customers rating service.  A good primer is available from Google http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/us/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

Samantha Clark
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