A New Dawn for Organic SEO: Why Marketers Need to Get Social
Remember the old days when optimizing a website was as simple as lathering the page with the same keyword repeated several times throughout the content (whether it was necessary or not)?
It’s no surprise that search engine algorithms are becoming increasingly more complex every day. Old SEO tactics like exact keyword match domains, quantity of keywords on a page, and massive amounts of keyword optimized anchor text are all on their way out (if not already.)
Hundreds of factors added on over the years by engineers have created a new pony in town every marketer should be trying to ride: social media. With such vast platforms like Twitter, Google+ and Facebook combining to have well over a billion active users between them, it’s easy to salivate over the marketing and organic SEO potential.
Cues to Attract Visitors
1) Search engines care about relevancy and value these days. Web sites that are not perceived as valuable to users might as well not exist. That’s why social media’s so important. Billions of links are shared across the social media highway effortlessly each day. People click on the links, and if they like it, continue to share with other users—the process is endlessly rewarding.
2) Social signals such as tweets, likes, and +1’s seemed like meaningless fads when they first surfaced. However, now marketers are finding that social signals hold a lot of weight when it comes to a web page’s ranking. The same is true from a domain level. The more people are tweeting and liking and +1ing, the more search engine crawlers perceive those pages to be of use to searchers. Not to mention all the direct inbound traffic resulting from shares on social media sites. You have to admit, it makes sense!
3) A webpage or site is nothing without a sleek design, smooth interface and readable content. As mentioned earlier, archaic-style page tactics with endless repetition hoping to win the keyword match battle will horribly fail due to their worthless value to searchers. There’s a much better chance users will link a page to their friends if they found the page valuable to themselves in the first place. This starts with page design, usability and content readability.
Tying it All Together
In short, the organic SEO game is still the same, but the rules have changed. Relevancy and importance have been steadily factored into algorithms for a while. And now social media marketing has cemented its place as the gatekeeper to achieving instant importance and perceived relevance. Savvy marketers will try to reach their target-markets directly via social media sites. Delivering quality content which sparks the interest of a specific audience will ultimately result in higher rankings and more direct-click visitors than ever before for the marketed website.
Being social has always been an effective way to get ahead in life, it’s about time SEO caught on.
This blog post was contributed by Kyle Blasco. Connect with Kyle on Google+.
