social media SEO tips which can get more traffic to your site

With the advent of social networks which started with the likes of Friendster and Myspace and which now boasts of heavyweights worth millions of dollars such as Facebook and Twitter, search engines now have no option but to take their content seriously. The reason they do so is entirely out of necessity. With an estimated number of active users north of 750 million and a global footprint throughout roughly 70 countries, Facebook and other social network users generate an astonishing amount of Internet traffic in the online discussions and other interactions they participate in.

Items of discussion vary widely depending on the individual interests, likings of each cliques or social groups. Search parameters and algorithms used to bring up search results have been changed and altered accordingly with prominence being given to results with social media links. You don’t need to take my word for it. Try keying in any search terms into Google or Bing and social media results would most probably show up in the top 10 sites displayed.

The reason why search engines especially prefer results with social media links is the simple fact that any information which have been tweeted or shared before are more likely to interest the searcher as they contain what other results do not, a human touch. What will be featured in this article below are a few search engine optimization tips involving social media to help generate traffic for your site.

1. Increase brand awareness and discussion on social networking sites
According to Matt Cutts, Google’s search engineer, Google has begun a significant shift in ranking signals; that is the way they rank and accord sites an order of importance when displaying search results. To determine whether or not a product, person or website is reputable enough to garner a place in their search results, Google now look in social networking sites too.

Take relevant steps therefore to ensure that your websites are known and discussed by social network users because the more people talk about it, the more likely it is going to be rated highly by search engines. You can do this through simple steps like linking users to sites containing your product through your blog, Facebook page and basically everywhere else you maintain an online presence.

2. Prepare for a long term campaign!
Social network users are huge in numbers; they come from different countries, speak different languages and naturally go online at different times too. To ensure that brand awareness for what you are marketing penetrate through every level of the user base of these social networking sites, do not give up after a few weeks or even months of work.

Take it as a commitment and place aside a set period of time each day for your campaign. Search engines give importance to newer results, whether they are comments, statuses or tweets so if you can ensure constant, long-term discussions take place about your product/brand, you would already have half the battle in your grasp.

3. Staying active with your own posts and tweets!
Do bear in mind that Internet surfers and users of social networking sites have generally short attention spans and you have to prepare a strategy that goes beyond catching their initial attention alone. Devise ways to get them constantly tuned to news or updates about your website such as signing them up for updates via emails.

Remember that users of these sites have a lot of other stuff that may catch their attention and most of them will not be willing to spend time searching for updates on your product, especially if they get disappointed the first few times they do so. Do take the time therefore to constantly update them with the latest news and inform them faithfully when there is scheduled maintenance or downtime for your site. Users appreciate your attention and there is nothing more attractive than the personal touch when sending out emails.

4. Make your posts relevant
When updating your blog or website, remember to make your posts relevant to the service or product you provide. Likewise, when posting your next status or tweet, remember to link your friends to your website too! It is not inadvisable to post certain personal issues from time to time. Your friends would like to feel they are interacting with someone their familiar with after all! However, when possible try to relate your posts with what your are marketing in an inconspicuous way so that people will be familiar with them.

5. Maintain basic courtesy!
Even when marketing your website or product, remember the basic decorum and ethics of Internet usage. Do not for example; spam the inboxes of your contacts with various updates that they may find irksome. People don’t mind information but try your best to ensure they do not get bothered with undesirable contents from your mail. They might get really upset and start telling bad things about your website or you!

To recapitulate, these social media SEO tips are tried and proven methods to ensure increased traffic for your website. The road to success however is long and arduous and you have to ensure that you constantly keep to it. If you failed to keep up previous efforts and decide to continue a few months later, expect it to be more difficult than before. This is because users who have been attracted the first time would be wary of going back to a site with such a track record while newcomers would certainly heed the Chatter from fellow users too.

get back to us to implement Social Media SEO tips on your site to get ranked within all search engines

How Search Engines Work for WEBSITE

The first basic truth you need to know to learn SEO is that search engines are not humans. While this might be obvious for everybody, the differences between how humans and search engines view web pages aren't. Unlike humans, search engines are text-driven. Although technology advances rapidly, search engines are far from intelligent creatures that can feel the beauty of a cool design or enjoy the sounds and movement in movies. Instead, search engines crawl the Web, looking at particular site items (mainly text) to get an idea what a site is about. This brief explanation is not the most precise because as we will see next, search engines perform several activities in order to deliver search results – crawling, indexing, processing, calculating relevancy, and retrieving.

First, search engines crawl the Web to see what is there. This task is performed by a piece of software, called a crawler or a spider (or Googlebot, as is the case with Google). Spiders follow links from one page to another and index everything they find on their way. Having in mind the number of pages on the Web (over 20 billion), it is impossible for a spider to visit a site daily just to see if a new page has appeared or if an existing page has been modified, sometimes crawlers may not end up visiting your site for a month or two.

What you can do is to check what a crawler sees from your site. As already mentioned, crawlers are not humans and they do not see images, Flash movies, JavaScript, frames, password-protected pages and directories, so if you have tons of these on your site, you'd better run the Spider Simulator below to see if these goodies are viewable by the spider. If they are not viewable, they will not be spidered, not indexed, not processed, etc. - in a word they will be non-existent for search engines.

After a page is crawled, the next step is to index its content. The indexed page is stored in a giant database, from where it can later be retrieved. Essentially, the process of indexing is identifying the words and expressions that best describe the page and assigning the page to particular keywords. For a human it will not be possible to process such amounts of information but generally search engines deal just fine with this task. Sometimes they might not get the meaning of a page right but if you help them by optimizing it, it will be easier for them to classify your pages correctly and for you – to get higher rankings.

When a search request comes, the search engine processes it – i.e. it compares the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the database. Since it is likely that more than one page (practically it is millions of pages) contains the search string, the search engine starts calculating the relevancy of each of the pages in its index with the search string.

There are various algorithms to calculate relevancy. Each of these algorithms has different relative weights for common factors like keyword density, links, or metatags. That is why different search engines give different search results pages for the same search string. What is more, it is a known fact that all major search engines, like Yahoo!, Google, Bing, etc. periodically change their algorithms and if you want to keep at the top, you also need to adapt your pages to the latest changes. This is one reason (the other is your competitors) to devote permanent efforts to SEO, if you'd like to be at the top.

The last step in search engines' activity is retrieving the results. Basically, it is nothing more than simply displaying them in the browser – i.e. the endless pages of search results that are sorted from the most relevant to the least relevant sites.

3 Creative Ways to Effective SEO for your website

Enhancing the search engine ranking of a website is the stepping stone to get traffic, as that ensures better profits. Optimization of the website for SEO is vital, as it is about arranging content, such that it matches a specific category.

Here are a few key steps you can follow to get your website recognized by search engines;

Keywords will considerably improve your ratings in search engine results, as it uses this information to classify the various terms for which the website is relevant. So the key is to concentrate on the keywords in the title tag, the URL, in the main article itself. The title of your article/website should be such that it should attract the attention of the browser.

Make sure that you use the ALT and TITLE tags in all the pictures. These tags are essential as they inform the search engines what the picture is about. Not only do they recognize images, but also determine the keyword density.

The Google Keyword Tool can be used to obtain new ideas, as they help you not only in looking for the required keywords but also provide information on the industry trends and the approximate CPC.

One of the top ways to get recognized by search engines is through Links (incoming). The popularity of a particular link on related websites can give better visibility to the search engine. Besides, outbound link, linking within the relevant pages can also be done.
Google can determine that, while a page linked to another page, with an assigned page rank, will increase the former’s ranking as well, one should keep in mind that each page has its own page rank. With superlative content, your website is bound to get recognized and hence be considered for linking. You may consider link exchange with related websites, or maybe write an article for a website and avail a quality link back.
Make sure that you do not exchange links with SEO spammers, as your ranking can get jeopardized and furthermore, avoid hidden text/links.

Content that you use on your website is a vital element for SEO, which enables your site to get more visibility on search engines. The main aspect for search engines is content, as it dictates the rankings, and in turn, brings in the audience. Ensure that you have relevant and substantial content, with the keywords going with a natural flow.

Last but not least, make you website primarily for your users. Search engine optimization methods are designed to increase traffic to your website by giving more visibility to search engines.

So, reach to me and my time getting quality SEO done on your site!!!