Internet Economy

There are plenty of legitimate ways to make money online. SEO best practices work to establish a site’s rank in search engine result pages. But what would be the point of that, if there wasn’t a way to make a profit? Does it really do me a lot of good for thousands of visitors to read my blog, watch my video or find my site? Not unless there is a way to monetize.

The internet economy is a strange and interesting place, a place where many people have learned to make lots of money and where many more have crashed and burned; more interestingly, it is a place where start ups (now giant corporations worth billions) have learned to profit off of our work and profit from the content that we [users] create, as well as to profit from the time that we spend relaxing [playing games…]  As Netizens [Internet Citizens] it is important for us to understand the internet economy, in the following I will discuss how Facebook makes money, how Angry Birds makes money, how You Tube makes money and will also discuss how blogs and other free content sites make money.  You are welcome to post a comment if you feel I missed something.

How does Facebook make money?

Facebook

We must face the fact that for the most part, many of us do not engage in activities unless we are sure we can make an extra buck or two. So what keeps Facebook free? It’s too big for someone to not be making some money off of it. And what about all the games that keep us tied up and away from our real work when no one is looking? Is anyone making money off of that? I play for free right?

Facebook is funded primarily by ads. You see them every time you log on – that’s the point. The more users they have, the more likely the ad will be seen. This makes the ad worth more monetarily. If I want to put an ad up I have to pay more because there is more likelihood that it will be seen by my target audience. That’s not much different than what kept television free for years.

Don’t kid yourself. Facebook is gathering information about you every time you log on, like something or click an advertisement. Then they sell the information that they gather about their users. With millions of users and loads of data; they can make quite a profit simply selling information.

 How does Angry Birds make money?

Angry Birds

Angry Birds is barely even 2 years old but Rovio already reports more than 100 million in revenues. In just this short time, it has become the most downloaded game ever with more than 600 million downloads. Rovio, which was on the verge of bankruptcy only, spent about $140,000 to develop this particular game. While most of Rovio’s revenue comes from the sale of the game, that’s only one way they make money.

Other than the sales of actual games and apps, ads are another huge source for Rovio. The game itself gets about 10 billion ad impressions every single month. Many have jokingly called the game an advertising network. Rovio uses partnerships along with ads. On Chrome you will see that one of their sponsors is Wonderful Pistachios. These products are intriguing to gamers because in the purchased package there are special game codes that will unlock various game features.

But ads and sponsorships are being incorporated into another realm to make more bucks. Rovio is continuing to slowly expand into the social world. Rather than having just static ads they are integrating the products into the whole game experience. This encourages those who are playing the game to interact with other people, the game and products. Recently they have been integrating into Google+ and even did a short trial run on Facebook. Adding this social aspect is ramping up its popularity and getting the users more deeply involved in playing; which in turn also turns up the revenue.

How do you make money with blogs and other free content?

 Notice how many blogs and niche sites have several ads. Just about any site can be “monetized” by the addition of advertisements. This is the main idea behind building some niche sites and then using SEO best practices to get the site ranked. The more visitors a site has, the more people who see the ads. The more people who see the ads, the more people who will click them and the more money the site developer will make.

Affiliate marketing is also a good way to make income from various free content sites. This means that you let someone like Amazon put a content specific link/ad on your page. When someone uses your link to surf their store and make a purchase, you get a percentage of that sale.

The real money in blogging does not come from affiliate marketing or adsense. There is a little to be made, but it will take a long time for it to amount to much at all. Most of the time blogs are used as part of an SEO campaign. A business person can write a blog which contains information about their product or services and then link it back to their main site. It is mostly a way to promote your main link.

How Do You Make Money on YouTube?

YouTube

One of the primary ways to make money on YouTube is to become a part of their partner program. If your videos are getting thousands of hits on a consistent basis, you could apply to become a partner. This would get your uploaded videos on their main page which of course would result in more views – which adds up to more chances for monetization.

Remember the YouTube video of the otters “holding hands?” Everyone shared it and thought it was the “cutest thing I’ve ever seen!” When a video like that goes viral YouTube will actually initiate a partner transaction. In this way they invite the video’s creator to monetize its publication and then the creator and YouTube share the revenue that comes in.

Cory Williams is one of those who started bringing in some big money through You Tube. He says that he really didn’t care for You Tube when it began but he enjoyed making his simple video productions and putting them up on You Tube just to share them with friends and family. He began to realize that he was getting a lot of hits on his uploaded videos and was one of the first to be a You Tube partner in revenue sharing. This income fluctuates with viewership though. Basically, when there are a lot of viewers he makes lots of money but the times that views dip down, so does the income. Revenue sharing and ad placement on the videos help to bring him in a decent income. But it also led to other income such as sponsorships. Of course, without the exposure on You Tube, these opportunities would not have presented themselves. It’s all about exposure.

Link Building

Link-building is a huge part of any successful SEO campaign. It works like this: if a wider variety of sites link to your site, Google rewards your site by placing you higher in search rankings. Especially if these links contain valuable anchor text related to your site. Other search engines operate in a similar fashion, but Google is the biggest player, and so most of my efforts are focused on ranking higher in Google search results pages.

Knowing this, it’s easy to go overboard when building links, and resort to tactics that will end up doing more harm than good, or simply waste your time. Buying links, using Comment Luv and Keyword Luv enabled blogs to build links in blog comments, and placing links in forum signatures are all examples of easy way to build links that do very little to actually improve your rankings. However, this shouldn’t suggest that you stop building links altogether. Instead you should concentrate on building higher quality links.

How Google Calculates Link Value

Building links on high domain authority or page rank sites is key to improving your SERP rankings. However, Google doesn’t just look at the anchor text of a link when calculating how it will affect the rankings of the site it links to. Google takes a number of things into account when calculating link value: topical value of the content surrounding the link, reputation of the site the content is posted on, and the degree of change in links back to your own site. By surrounding a link with relevant keywords and body copy, you’re telling Google that the link is related to those terms. Google uses a value called Page Rank to determine how reputable a site is. The age of a site, the number of inbound versus outbound links, and social media signals such as Facebook Likes and Tweets, are part of Google’s Page Rank calculation. The degree of change in your links is a measure of how quickly links are built. If Google sees a huge increase from one week to the next, this raises a flag that inappropriate link-building techniques may be used.

Context is important for building valuable links. It’s important to build links on sites that are related or similar to your site, both for search engines and human visitors. Your time is better spent building a link on a PR5 site that’s related to your own site than building a link on a higher ranked site that is completely unrelated. The best way to rank better in Google searches is to build links where humans will actually click through to your own site.

Relevant Links Bring Better Traffic

Focusing on building relevant links will also result in more direct traffic. People are more likely to click on a link if it’s placed in a related website, blog post or forum. Your goal isn’t just higher traffic—it’s higher conversions. It doesn’t matter if you consider a version to be a successful sale from your e-commerce store, or a new subscription to your SaaS application, or a new regular reader of your blog. Users who find your site through a link on a related website are far more likelier to convert than users who arrive at your site through a link built in a totally unrelated area. Good SEO is about higher conversions, not just higher traffic, and link placement in valuable forums, blog posts and other areas is the best way to build links that will bring visitors ready to convert.

How to Find Areas for Building Relevant Links

My favorite tool for finding good places to build links is Google Alerts. It’s easy to populate a list of key words and phrases you want to monitor, and set how you want to be notified of relevant posts. You can choose the kind of posts you want to be alerted to, and how often you want to see these alerts. I like to use “discussions” to find relevant forum and blog posts for placing links. Most of the referral traffic I see on my websites comes from relevant links. Finding people who have a problem that one of my company’s products will solve takes more time than simply blasting links all over the internet, but with a focused link-building strategy, we see more interested visitors who are ready to convert.

This guest post was written by Tyler Moore

Tyler Moore works at Expected Behavior, a web development firm based in Indianapolis. Expected Behavior has built a product called DocRaptor, a web application used to generate PDF files from pure HTML. DocRaptor handles CSS styling better than comparable programs, and uses a simple HTTP POST request to convert HTML to PDF.

Dynamic Web Design

A lot of thoughtful preparation and planning goes into any type of website. These hours are devoted to the site long before it ever goes up for the world to see. However, an ecommerce website design takes much more planning and research.  Ecommerce websites are dynamic and therefore require far more effort to set up and run.  Static and dynamic sites are very different in the way that they occupy their web spaces, present content to users and provide interaction; so they each need unique attention from SEO specialists to be successful. This of course, includes the website design.

Static vs. Dynamic

A static site is very quick to set up and easy to maintain. These are great for sharing information with clients and for using the web 2.0 platform for them to share the same on the various social media sites. But other than that they are not as functional as a dynamic site.

The dynamic site is set up for complete interaction. While this type of site may host various forums or polls and other components that are interactive the ecommerce website is designed specifically with web elements like an online storefront. Thus they are much more complex for the SEO specialist to develop.

Dynamic Content

Content is uploaded and stored onsite and built in to a static website. The layout and content are sort of merged together. However, with the dynamic website the content is based on a database and the content is stored separately from the site itself. This allows greater flexibility. When someone looks for a certain piece of content, like a product, the content is merged into the layout and they are then displayed to the customer. This allows the content to be flexible and the webmaster can simply update the database to update the content on the site. This is useful for larger ecommerce sites such as Amazon. Imagine how difficult it would be if every time the content needed to be updated the web marketing specialists would have to update the entire site! Instead, they can constantly create content and it is automatically updated in the database and available for customers who come seeking particular product information.

SEO for a Dynamic Website

For the static site of 4 or maybe 5 pages, SEO strategies remain unchanged. Fresh, quality content, relevant backlinks and well designed pages are some of the SEO strategies that will keep them at the top of the search engine result pages, at least in their niche. But a 4 or 5 page static site no matter how great its design is can never compete with a dynamic site such as Amazon. How do they use SEO strategies?

Dynamic sites have somewhat of an advantage as their content is constantly changing therefore it is always fresh and relevant. A content management system can help establish the linking process and also organize content by using various categories or tags. The constantly updated content seems to please the search engine crawlers as this is one thing that they look for to establish site relevancy and ranking.

Conclusion

If you just need a site to store information and interact on a simple level using web 2.0 platforms, a static site is all that is needed. But it will be a much more complex setup and procedure to develop and design a dynamic ecommerce site. But in the complexity, customers can easily find what they are looking for. Site design can contain search tools, shopping carts and user logins to help serve your clientele more effectively.

Premiere Creative

Partners in Marketing

The well qualified staff at Premiere Creative takes their role very seriously. They treat each business as a marketing partner and work to help clients achieve their business goals. This means that they work for clients to help them build their customer base and this in turn helps to increase profits. It does not matter what size of a business they partner with, the marketing specialists create a unique marketing campaign that is designed specifically for each business. Professional designers do not have a patterned program that they use for every customer. Instead each customer’s advertising and marketing needs are carefully considered to determine the most effective methods to be employed. After a thorough assessment they will choose a combination of the two platforms, web 2.0 and traditional media, to design an effective marketing campaign that will be both profitable and productive for the business.

Types of Media

Premiere Creative may use a wide variety of traditional media which includes a variety of standard forms of communication whether it is print or broadcasting. Their qualified marketing specialists may use several different platforms available through traditional media such as content marketing, copywriting or direct mail. As a general rule, they will not use only one method or strategy to reach their desired goals. Multichannel marketing is a common practice and using this approach allows potential customers many opportunities to come in contact with the products or services offered by the business. Multichannel marketing is simply advertising at an effective level.

This same multichannel practice is used when considering the various platforms available across the web 2.0. Professionals make expert choices when designing marketing strategies for any business. Among the platforms available is social media marketing, email marketing and content marketing. This combination employs the best SEO practices along with metric analysis and tracking to ensure that methods are achieving and surpassing the desired goals.

Branding

Using marketing strategies is very important to branding. This is a very strategic marketing strategy that can bring much success to a business or company. The point of branding is to position the company’s product or service in front of potential customers so that it is easily recognizable to customers.

Generating Leads

Although each marketing strategy and campaign is unique, they do share a common goal. Premiere Creative is dedicated to increasing traffic to a business. This increased traffic can be in various formats such as literally driving to a physical location, visiting a website or be moved to make any other type of contact. The team works hard to create a positive web presence as they feel that is a business’ main sales professional. Web development is of the utmost importance since a website is available to customers all day, every day, and all year long. One of the most effective and cost efficient ways to maximize a business’ ROI and raise profitability is to use the various web 2.0 based platforms.

Premiere Creative needs to have a very clear strategy and plan of action which includes follow through in order to achieve a high level of enterprise. Designers must be aware of and be able to identify purposes and goals for each business. This helps them be effective at choosing successful means to develop a successful web campaign.

Google Algorithm

The Google algorithm is a highly advanced piece of software that is able to examine every website and to determine the best search results for any query in less then a second.  The algorithm itself is a proprietary property of Google and has never (will never) been released in full, although we know many of the things that the algorithm looks at when determining the rankings of a page.  According to Google they look at 200+ different metrics for each page to determine that pages rank (about half of these metrics are well known/used by SEOs) although it is likely that Google looks at thousands of metrics that are not released.  Having an understanding of the nature of Google’s algorithm is essential to the completion of an SEO strategy and to the work of professional SEO experts.

One of the better known/ better understood metrics is Page Rank, PR is a metric that we are able to measure to compare the value of any page.  Page Rank was at one time a dominant factor in the Google algorithm, but with each new version of the algorithm PR has diminished in its importance, although this is still something that plays a role.  Given that Page Rank is one of the better understood parts of the Google search algorithm I would like to take a few minutes to describe what it is and how it works.

Page Rank is a big piece of the Google algorithm, and although Google has added much to their search algorithm through the years it remains a big piece of the puzzle.  Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin originally published the PageRank algorithm. It may have been tweaked some since it was developed, but it is certain that Google still uses some variation of it to rank internet pages. The actual PR formula is:

PR(A)=(1-d)+d(PR(T1)/C(T1)+…+PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

In this equation t1 and ti are the pages that are linking in to page A and “C” represents the number of outbound links from the page. “d” is a damping factor that is somewhere between 0 and 1. “d” is generally assigned the value of 0.85.  T1…Tn is the number of pages linking to Page A. And C represents the number of links going out from page A.

PageRank

Damping Factor

Determining PageRank is calculated as though every user would behave in the same way.  In other words, there is an assumption made that each person receives a random web page and keeps on clicking through links. PageRank in one respect is based on the probability that anyone randomly surfing will visit that particular page. The damping factor, represented by “d” in the algorithm is used to factor in the probability the each surfer will stop and request a different page. The probability factor is represented in the formula by the constant 1-d). In reality, no matter how many inbound links a page has, the probability of someone randomly surfing the page will always be (1-d), this way each page always has a minimum PageRank. By factoring the damping factor in to the algorithm it makes it almost impossible to trick the system into getting a higher rank.

Calculating a Page’s Rank

PageRank is not set in stone and each time a new calculation is done, any previous PR is ignored completely. The new PR is figured by the inbound links that it has at the time of the calculation. These links could be very different from the last time the PR was calculated. T represents the pages that provide inbound links to our page A. This alone does not affect the PR of page A overall. But the PR of page T is influenced by how many outbound links C(T) are going from page T. If you notice in the formula, the denominators are weighted with “C” which represents the outbound links from page T. In other words, the more links going out from page T, the less likely it is to be beneficial to page A. This way the weighted PR of “T” or incoming pages are added up. The result is that inbound links will always work to increase the PageRank of page A. This sum is then multiplied by the damping factor and the result is the PageRank of page A.

Other Google Algorithm metrics

Anchor text can also have an advantage. Usually, this gives a better description of the web pages than what you’ll see even on the page itself. Anchor text may exist for pages that are not easily indexed such as images, databases or programs. This means that sometimes searches can yield pages that have not been indexed.  Other than PageRank and anchor text, there are other things Google may consider. For one, Google can track some of the visual details like the size of fonts on a page. Larger and bolder fonts can carry more weight. And Google looks at HTML of pages.

As the internet has matured Google has begun to lower the importance of Page Rank and increase the importance of other factors, some of these factors are: the age of the site, the freshness of the site’s content, and the overall relevance of the H1 title of the site to the search query.  Additionally Google has started to give increasing weight to social media and other web 2.0, and with the increasing rise of the Google Plus network it is pretty clear that social will grow in importance.  There are many other factors that Google looks at but these remain proprietary secrets of the company and SEOs and webmasters are limited to using the SEO best practices that are known and that Google has released.

Good Content

Use of Keywords

While good content should make wise use of keywords, it should not be filled with extreme overuse of keywords. Panda will recognize keyword stuffing very quickly and it will be tagged as lacking good content which will certainly lower the site’s ranking. Part of website optimization is including keyword usage of about 1-2 percent. This means that for a typical 400 word piece you only want the main keyword used about 4 or 5 times. Related keywords may be used but should not be overused.

Creating content that is full of useful and interesting information can be a large part of website optimization. It is more than just a nice place to put keywords to catch the eye of the search engines. Quality content on a site is beneficial for both search engine optimization and capturing the attention of site visitors.

The Key to Good Content

Perhaps the best way to approach the content on your site is to think about it a different way. You cannot talk to more than one customer at a time, however, through your website a customer or potential client can read about your business or products 24/7. When you are writing your content, write like the customer is sitting across from you. If you had the opportunity to speak directly with a potential customer, what would you want them to know about you and your business? Write as though you were speaking directly to your customers.

Content needs to be written in a way which provides adequate coverage of your topic. Make sure it is original and well written. Always check and double check content for grammatical errors. And finally, content needs to be worth sharing with social sites such as social bookmarking communities.

Effect of Good Content

There is a definite positive effect from quality content that is shared across the web 2.0 and social media platforms. Search engines are beginning to use various social bookmarks and backlinks. Marketing specialists report that social media is having a greater influence on SERPs than before.  Many are also reporting a positive effect on sales due to site content, or branded content. This positive influence includes content on more than just primary websites. Many marketing experts cite that many online businesses have increased their customer base through sites such as a company blog which is linked back to the main business website.

Successful SEO

Think about if you were operating a physical store and were putting out a particular product for sale. You would try to make it visible carefully placing it out where customers can find it so that they will purchase the item. This is really what a successful SEO campaign does for your site. It gets your product (website) out where it can be seen.  Many website optimization strategies are used so that the search engines will display the site when specific related keywords are typed in.

Think about how many billions of websites there are across the internet these days. When someone types in a keyword to do a search the three major search engines will display the top 10 of those sites deemed most relevant. Nearly 70 percent will never venture past the first page of results. And 98 percent will never get past the 3^rd page. This is why you do need a New Jersey SEO to work on your website. Without an effective SEO strategy, it’s about the same as if you do not even have a website on the internet at all.

Obviously it is important to get your site or page into the top results in the three main search engines: Google, Bing and Yahoo. But the web design is also a major factor. If you accomplish the goal of obtaining targeted traffic to your site and then the site is not user friendly, such as being difficult to navigate the visitor will look for their answer somewhere else. SEO and web design are partnered together to bring you the best search results and meet the customer’s needs once they reach your site.

Engaging in a successful SEO web marketing campaign is an involved bit of work. It takes time to research, develop and test results. By hiring an SEO specialist you free yourself up to take care of your business; the area of your expertise while allowing the SEO to work from his level of expertise and provide you the traffic to your site. Search engine optimization is necessary for those who have a business website. The benefits are measured in consistent traffic, positive ROI (return on investment) and ultimately sales. Yes, you really do need to hire an SEO.

Content is king

We have heard the term many times, “Content is King.” But is it really? Is it really that important to a web marketing campaign? How much emphasis should be on the content on a site? Many have the misconception that a successful SEO campaign is only supposed to drive traffic to a site with no concern about what the visitor finds once they reach it. However, visitors and search engines alike are looking for good content on a site. Panda in particular will look at the quality of the content when determining a site’s ranking.  This means that developing a page which contains quality content is a very important part of an SEO campaign in New Jersey. Without quality content a page will not make the top rankings in search engine result pages. And without good content, visitors will quickly move on to another site which will end up costing revenue. Creating good content is an essential element of web design. The right content can have many benefits.

Benefits of Good Content

Good content is important for search engine rankings, but it is equally important for site visitors. Data suggests that a site visitor who clicks on a site takes as little as 7 seconds to determine whether the site is worth staying on or whether they will move on. Having quality information available for site visitors can be a key to getting a long term customer.

Most of the time when someone bookmarks a site it is because of the content that is displayed. Having useful, quality information and content on a page will encourage site visitors to share it with others who have like interests. Site content is a good place to put links to other sites and pages as well. These links are an essential element in successful SEO in New Jersey.

Good Content and SEO

Good content

In some ways, a successful SEO campaign will be built upon good content. This is because the content affects search engine results. Good content needs to be relevant, informative and updated regularly for search engines to consider the site’s ranking. Content is what helps bring targeted visitors to a site. This will help to increase its ranking. No matter what types of algorithms are used by the major search engines, content will be a constant.

Good content can help increase a site, or page ranking. In an SEO campaign one of the defining factors that work to increase a site’s rank is indeed the on site content. Content is for the visitor, not the search engine – it must captivate them and answer their questions. And valuable content becomes more share-worthy. This makes a visitor more likely to share it through various social media platforms such as a social bookmarking site. These links can create more organic traffic to the site which is one thing that counts with search engine algorithms.

An SEO campaign is designed and developed to increase a site’s rank; which is intended to increase site visitors. The goal is of course, to increase revenue through sales. Content is what entices visitors; and plays a major role in influencing them to buy services or products. This all translates to a higher ROI. So as far as an SEO campaign is concerned, content is still king!

Future of Search

Google uses over 200 elements to determine a page’s rank in search engine result pages. Every week there are different areas that they make changes to. The way that Google searches and ranks sites can greatly affect SEO campaigns and strategies. It is important to stay aware of the changes made by Google and how they may or may not affect web marketing campaigns. Some of the changes may seem minute and only actually affect a very small part of the web population. However, other changes, some very necessary can have a huge effect across the entire web. It helps to know, at least in part, how Google’s algorithm works and what could stand some changes.  Most of the changes that Google makes to the algorithm are small tweaks that do not have a large impact on work that is done by SEO’s; a few times a year Google releases a major update to their system, for example the Panda update, which drastically changed the way that Google ranks pages and led to many sites loosing their coveted first page status, or more recently the Plus Your World update, which attempts to integrate Google plus into search results.  These changes certainly can work to shape the future of the internet and SEO.  When looking at the way that Google is changing their algorithm we must keep in mind that Google is a private company and that their primary goal is to stay competitive in a very fast paced and evolving field, any changes they make to search are designed to make them more competitive.

What Google Needs to Change

When looking at possible changes that may be in the pipeline by Google developers there are a few things that they are likely working on.  There are three important areas that Google search needs to address. The first one is that they need to realize it really is the World Wide Web. I say this because everyone in the world is not using American English to surf, or to search. Actually, if you use any language that uses characters you’re going to run into problems.

Secondly, contents’ freshness needs to be, and is being addressed. If a user types in a query about the Olympics, it is likely they desire information about the upcoming 2012 Olympics. Google is working on giving the freshest results available. Actually, they recently finished their Caffeine web indexing system. Google introduced Caffeine in 2010. It is a specially designed web indexing system that was created to find and display relevant content much quicker than previously designed index systems. Caffeine searches the web looking for the most recent relevant content when a query is entered. This ensures web users that their results are the latest news or information available on a search topic.

Lastly, there needs to be some serious changes made in how a page’s relevance is determined. Presently for most inquiries users are very likely to get an Amazon page, or a Wikipedia page on page 1 in their results even if the information contained on them is not directly relevant to the search.  The reason for this is because sites like Amazon and Wikipedia are dominant sites with millions of backlinks and high Page Rank and Google views them as authorities on a range of topics.  One big thing that the Panda update has done is to drop the value of sites such as Amazon/Wikipedia for many search queries, but it is likely that when the next Panda update is released (and yes I’m sure there will be a “next Panda update”) that they will continue to improve the relevance of content within search results.  For an SEO this means that content is still king and that we need to focus more on quality!

The future of search

Content will remain a valuable asset used for determining a site’s relevance and ranking. The Panda update has already made a big dent in this arena. But one difference down the road is to look for more details in content. It’s not about simply writing longer posts, but more about giving more attention to more details. Longer posts can have an advantage when Google bots are indexing. Usually, longer posts are deemed more relevant or important.

SEO Theory

Social media platforms will be the wave of the future as far as SEO best practices go. There was a time when SEO shunned social media, but due to Google including links from various social media platforms in their rankings algorithm, they will become a leveraging factor. The point is not simply creating content, but creating content that is share worthy. The idea is to create some sorts of viral content that is so worth sharing it will crawl all the way across various social media sites. The thinking about content will become if it is worth sharing on Facebook , Twitter or other social sites. These will be the trends in the next few months or years. SEO best practices will need to incorporate strategies that will help promote the sharing of content through the use of social media.

SEO practices, particularly on page strategies, will not change too much. There will just be more emphasis put on the sharing capabilities of social media. Social media will be the driving force behind SEO. Google has already pushed to begin to integrate social media into SERPs.

http://www.aismedia.com/images/section_social_media_marketing.png

There are plenty of times the number of visitors and page views will spike as the social media side of the world, which is often followed by higher bounce rates, lower pageviews per visitor and even a lower average time on the site. With numbers jumping up and down, bouncing from page to page, it often makes the positive articles about social media be brought into question.

It may be true that social media visitors visit and leave quickly, but there are plenty of reasons why social media should still be implemented into the marketing strategy and plan of any business.

The Best Parts

Free: Social media is completely free. Signing up for those websites you will use to communicate with your consumers, such as Facebook and Twitter, don’t charge a setup fee. They normally make all their money, like a lot of companies, with advertizing so it’s completely free to sign up, add your information and get to communicating.

Quick: The results are quick. Like incredibly so. Building a website that is successful can take months or even years; but post the right link or post via social media, and you can have thousands of visitors that will help get your new website or blog seen very quickly. The quicker the better, so why not use social media to do so. With extra links that get sent out with your social media, your search engine’s rank may also go up quickly.

Easy: For those just starting out and may think that social media is overwhelming, it gets easier. The more you work with social media, the more you understand the ins and outs. You will get a feel for your users and your particular social media sites. Also, it does not require as much time as some think. Some use social media every day by adding a post while others feel they should be on the internet for hours and hours. Both can have positive results, but you don’t need to stress about being online every waking minute.

Some Other Positives

Social media users aren’t always the most talkative although that seems to usually be the point. The difference is if they aren’t talking, they are sharing. Taking one link from one site and then posting it to another site builds your back links and inbound links. These links help boost your rank and drive traffic to your website. Another thing to learn about social media is that users become predictable. Predictability definitely helps the process. Once you have an understanding of your audience, you will get a feel for what will get a response to and what may just flop where it is. It will also be easier to cater to what your audience wants once you know them.

Future in Social Media

Social media and social networking are growing stronger by the day. With every link and every Tweet and every post, the social media world gets stronger and stronger. With millions of users, Facebook and other big sites will continue to grow and companies will continue to utilize social media for their own communication purposes.

This guest post was written by Miscelleana Rhinehart

 Miscelleana Rhinehart has been writing for years and enjoy sharing her words with others. She has written for Nexteppe, a marketing company, for more than two years. Sharing her thoughts helps her bring knowledge to the Internet.