Social Media Marketing Explained by a Dallas Social Media Expert

If you are looking to drive more traffic to your website, do not underestimate the power of Social Media. More and more webmasters are tapping into the popularity of these sites to attract visitors to their own websites, as well as to enhance their search engine rankings. A well run campaign that includes activity in social marketing sites is becoming an important part of search engine optimization. Marketing companies, like our Dallas Search Marketing firm,  now exist to help with every type of small and medium-sized business enterprises marketing challenges using all the vastly different social media sites and strategies. Sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Reddit and StumbleUpon have become very popular with website owners seeking to reach out on the Internet,  with impressive results. Millions of users visit sites such as Reddit and Digg daily. Popurls or Wired tap into the enormous volume of Internet users wanting information on the latest videos, hot topics and popular subjects using their mashup sites. Much of their content comes from what is being done at the popular social networking sites.

According to the Dallas SEO firm, Social media as it applies to search engine marketing, is not limited to any one way for people to interact on the internet. They may use video, audio or blogs. Web 2.0 sites (sometimes hard to define) with multiple users are also technically social media. The big social media sites are not alone in providing ways for Internet users to share information and network. The more successful mashup websites are like “The Week,” a widely read news magazine. These sites organize the big stories, videos, news or humor clips and episodes of Hulu. They use an endless variety of sources available on the Internet. Get your article featured on a site like Digg and watch the traffic to the content you created soar.

On the Internet, reputation is everything. When you take advantage of these social media websites to post content, search engines notice that. Search engines such as Google consider links to social media sites as more trustworthy and valuable. If you use backlinks in your content the search engines pick up on them and rank those links more positively, which enhances the rankings when internet users do a search. Your links appear to be ones users would want to receive on their searches. The traffic you get from links to social media sites are completely organic, meaning they are free–you did not purchase them or do link exchanges to get the traffic. Search engines like sites that attract natural traffic.The  Social Media Marketing Dallas team of smbSEO has resources available on this subject.

The traffic you receive through a social media marketing strategy may not be targeted traffic but the volume still increases the value of your link in the view of the search engines. Keeping fresh content, whether blogs, articles or videos, flowing to your social media sites also pleases search engines. Internet users will keep coming to your site if they know they will find new, interesting information. The combination of fresh content and increased traffic will convince search engines that your site is the one internet users want to find.

If you are serious about running a successful campaign for search engine marketing, you must make optimization and social media marketing important tactics in your overall strategy. One important tactic involves your keyword phrases. Some social media sites are enormous sites with millions of members and millions of visitors daily. You need to be very canny about selecting you keywords, using mid to long-tail (multi-word) phrases.

Social media, like all SEO efforts, requires ongoing upkeep. Traffic may surge and then will taper off after a few weeks or months. But the in-between levels of traffic will be elevated because every time you create a surge of interest, a few more internet users have learned about your site and hopefully made it one of their favorites and shared with other users. Constant fresh content will keep them coming.

Social Media has grown from a college campus phenomena to a world wide power, where the entire planet can keep in touch with events and people all over. The importance and power of these sites to attract users has generated the many new sites that today are household terms and didn’t exist ten or even five years ago. There is so sign that their popularity is going to wane, simply because they are so much fun and have become so important for networking for business (such as LinkedIn) and disseminating information instantly (Twitter.) If you aren’t hopping onto the social media bandwagon, you can bet your competition has, so don’t miss the chance to harness the incredible power of these powerhouse sites.