SEO and Social Media

According to Wikipedia, ‘Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a webpage in search engine via the unpaid (algorithmic) search results.' On the other hand, Social Media Marketing is the advertising of products/services via the sharing and exchange of user generated content online.

Google alone handles more than 300 million searches per day, and Facebook has over 800 million active users generating a billion pieces of content daily. These mindboggling numbers only cement the fact that for an online advertiser today, ignoring either of these two tools is akin to committing a marketing hara kiri.

Search engines are changing rapidly today, with social media being the primary driving force. Both Bing and Google accept that their search results are positively affected by social signals such as tweets, FB Likes and +1s. Modern search engines totally ignore archaic ranking methods like HTML Meta tags, and increasingly incorporate inbound links and popularity metrics to generate results. This is where the power of social media, with its inherent nature of encouraging sharing, voting, commenting and linking can be harnessed to the fullest by search engine optimizers.

The marriage of social media and search engine optimization is solemnized on the simple thumb-rule that ‘if people are actively sharing your content, then it's probably pretty good.'