Tips for Combining your Social Media and SEO Strategies

Social media and SEO, being the latest buzzwords in marketing, seem to offer unlimited success in raising brand awareness and reaching new customers online. Both strategies are foolproof, however, and both can actually diminish the online success of a brand if handled clumsily.

SEO and social media are both difficult for the amateur to grasp, simply because the environment they exist in transforms and develops rapidly. Outdated SEO techniques, for example, will at best have no effect on your page rankings in search engine results, or at worst will bury your page further down the list as it is perceived as either spam or irrelevant.

One of the latest online marketing innovations is the practice of combining social media and SEO techniques for a more holistic approach to broadening an online audience. This trend could mean that further developments in both are easier to follow, as they share more and more qualities. Here are a few tips on how to integrate your social media and SEO strategies to get more success both with search engines and with real people on the web.

• Write social content with SEO in mind: Including social content, such as blogs, videos, audio or images, in your web design can be a great technique to increase the interactivity of your site and to encourage user contributions through comments, discussions and queries. Social content is also useful for optimisation as it has a fantastic capacity for interlinking, if it is interesting. The SEO prospects of your blog and other social content can be further improved through basic keyword targeting.
• Use social media to drive traffic to your site: The purpose of SEO is undoubtedly to increase traffic to your site, and this can be done fairly easily through social media. You can make the most of the connections you make through social media by offering your social contacts limited discounts or broadcasting messages with enticing tag lines. Importantly, this boosts traditional SEO efforts as well, now that search engines are beginning to use social activity on a web page to determine its worth and relevance.
• Write interesting content: The best piece of advice for SEO is, and always has been, to produce interesting content that people will want to share with each other across the web. Now that Google's search algorithm focuses on how many times a particular article or web page is tweeted, amongst other things, the need to focus on engaging content, alongside other SEO techniques is even more important.