Social media optimization taking over from SEO

Search engine optimization has been the preferred internet marketing tool but it has always been somewhat a flawed concept. At its worst, SEO referrers to making the web content to be less interesting for the readers but allegedly better for the mysterious algorithms and the search robots which decides the order by which the results appear on Google search. At its best, SEO means that you get nothing extra than following the best practices in creating clear and accessible websites that have meaningful titles, intelligent content, no broken links, descriptive attributes for images and everything else makes a web destination that has high-quality.

Search engine optimization is however currently on a dying trend. A remarkable post by Dan Graziano disclosed a search on Google might only display 13% of the organic results with the rest being just junks and ads. A recent report from Forrester detailing on how the consumers arrived at websites in 2012 indicates that social media is catching up with the search and it accounted for 32% of the website discoveries compared to 54% of the search. This, according to respondents from the US is an increase from 25% in the year 2011. There has also been a growing trend where results that are localized are delivered to the users of mobile phones, possibly by the use of an app instead of a web page. This has been identified as another one of the reasons why the traditional search engine optimization has been losing its importance.

A better model for the businesses that are using the digital marketing tools is to take into consideration the meaning of being social media optimized, focusing only on the interaction that is consumer-centric, rather than just trying to set up property for the website while hoping that Google will distribute the hits. It is common knowledge that simple recommendations from friends can be more important to a business than what you can ever hope to achieve a from a search engine algorithm.

With the above being said, many people start to ask themselves what is social media optimization, commonly referred to as SMO. Social media optimization is all about welcoming people into a conversation rather than just relaying the message. SMO is about listening to the chatter taking place on the social media and then acting on those results so that you can promote your business. Social media optimization is a twitter handle or a hashtag on each advert, plus a reactive team in the wake of that presence of social media for the people who respond to it. It is also about multiple touch points being integrated on several channels in order for the customers and the clients to get a reliable experience from all those channels.

The above features of social media optimization are not that easy as it may seem to implement. However, the technology to integrate them is now available and when implemented, they will have the ability of not only increasing the number of sales but also changing the experience that the customers get. With social media optimization in place, search engine optimization will not be missed anytime soon.