The Importance of Content and Social Media for SEO

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The Importance of Content and Social Media for SEO

Adding new content to your website consistently is a must if you want to improve your search engine rankings. The search engines like to see new content being added to a site and this forms an important part of the algorithm used to determine ranking. If you add new content once or twice a week it should be sufficient (depending on what your competitors are doing).

New content can add more benefit if you also submit it to article directories or social sites. If your Blog is in a subdirectory on your server, content added to your Blog will count as new content. The key is to remain consistent at all times. When your content addition strategy is in place it is time to look at social media.

Social media as defined on Wikipedia is:

Social media is an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio. This interaction, and the manner in which information is presented, depends on the varied perspectives and “building” of shared meaning among communities, as people share their stories, and understandings.

Social media can take many different forms, including Internet forums, message boards, weblogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures and video. Technologies include: blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, music sharing, crowd sourcing, and voice over IP, to name a few.

Examples of social media applications are Google Groups (reference, social networking), Wikipedia (reference), MySpace (social networking), Facebook (social networking), Last.fm (personal music), YouTube (social networking and video sharing), Second Life (virtual reality), Flickr (photo sharing), Twitter (social networking and microblogging) and other microblogs such as Jaiku and Pownce. Many of these social media services can be integrated via social network aggregation platforms like Mybloglog and Plaxo.

Social networks allow you to post videos, articles, podcasts, Blogs, bookmarks, links, profiles and comments. It is very easy to share your message or marketing information through the use of these social sites. Content is however still king and your message needs to be of interest to the readers in order to spread.

The big companies have woken-up to the potential of reaching a big market through the use of social sites and most are actively involved in social media marketing. Social media allows companies to interact with their customers and to market their products in a new way. Google and Bing are currently pulling updates from Twitter into the SERPs (search engine results pages). Facebook is facing a huge outcry from their customers after changing the privacy settings and thereby allowing private information to be displayed on the SERPs.

When using one of the social sites always look at posting unique and quality content. The search engines will pick-up on quality content and will disregard multiple post of the same message as spam. Do not link your Facebook and Twitter accounts. It is better to post unique content on both to improve the chance of Google or Bing listing it on the SERPs. Remember that SEO and Social Media are interlinked. If you want to improve your search engine rankings, make full use of the social media sites that are available on the Web.

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