Social Media Marketing
Social Media Marketing (SMM) has become a marketing strategy to compliment search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. Services such as Digg, del.icio.us, and reddit are examples of social media sites, where blogs and articles can be posted or tagged.
The advantage of these sites are that they are targeted towards specific communities, which means that companies can deliver their messages to the appropriate targeted audience. Your target audience also become participants of your marketing strategy with the ability to tag and bookmark postings from the site. Search engines reward postings because of the linkability, fresh content-richness, and because of the high traffic to these websites. Most importantly Social Media Marketing will help increase traffic to your company's website.
From the beginning of Social Media Marketing, Marcel Media has found such an incredible value in using this strategy to boost our clients' SEO campaigns. We research the most effective places to include our clients in the social media network. The exponential growth of Social Media has created even more webpages for webcrawlers to search through, increasing your companies visibility through SMM will help you be even more visible to search engines.
To find out more about how Social Media Marketing can help your company, read our Tip Sheet "6 Ways Social Media can Help Boost Your Search Engine Optimization Program ."
Blogs
Blogs are a digital newspaper of sorts. They provide commentary on a particular topic such as law, technology or politics. Blogs consist of periodic entries varying in length from one paragraph to a few pages or more. Since blogs are ever changing due to adding more and more unique information they are a valuable asset in terms of SEO rankings. Additionally, blogs provide new and fresh content for users, bringing them back to your site again and again.
Interactive Forums
Continuing with the user generated concept, forums are another way to actively engage users. Forums allow users to signup and comment on various topics, ask questions, and even promote products. Forums cultivate a customer support presence behind your product, service or company. Like blogs, because there is always fresh content being added to the forum, search engines will promote your search ranking and users will continue to come back.
Podcasting
iTunes and the iPod popularized the term "podcasting". A podcast is a digital media file like an mp3 file containing an episode of an audio show. Podcasts can be created by an individual or a group of people. A Podcast can be thought of as a digital recording of a radio show which can be downloaded. People subscribe to podcasts via RSS feeds to stay up to date on a certain topic. Businesses can use a Podcast to keep users informed on a certain topic while also promoting their own
service or product in an innovative way.
RSS Feeds
RSS feeds are a way of collecting all of the articles of a blog or all of the episodes of a podcast together in one file. Think of it like a table of contents for your blog or podcast. Users can subscribe to this table of contents using a blog reader or even use ITunes to subscribe to audio podcasts.