Now more than ever, company marketers are challenged with improving performance with fewer resources and shifting marketing budgets from traditional to digital tactics like SEO and social media. There are significant benefits from combining search engine optimization and social media marketing tactics ranging from increased social network discovery via search to the ability to attract links for improved SEO.

Implementing a social media marketing program without optimizing content is leaving money on the table. Useful social content (blog, video, images, audio) that cannot be discovered via search is a lost opportunity to reach an audience that is looking.

1. Find the Audience:
Understand their behaviors, preferences, methods of publishing, and sharing.
Most companies that are involved with the social web in the channels where their customers spend time have a good sense of where to start. Get involved.
2. Define your objectives:
Objectives are often driven by marketing or sales, and SEO has long been directly accountable to substantial improvements in web sales. Social media is not direct marketing. The role of SEO in a social media effort is to directly influence discovery of social communities or content via search.
3. Establish a game plan:
The game plan for reaching objectives in a combined SEO and social media effort will often focus on content and interaction, since it is content that people discover and share. Whether a keyword-focused strategy for reaching goals means publishing new content or creating an opportunity for consumer-generated content, it must involve proactive promotion and easy sharing ability.
4. Creating a strategic mix:
The strategic mix for a social media marketing effort is based on doing the homework of finding where the desired audience spends its time interacting with and sharing content. Much of the content creation and promotion for a social media marketing effort happens within the strategic mix and optimizing content for keywords.
5. Measure your goals:
Leveraging both social media monitoring services as well as web analytics can provide marketers with the insight to improve results. Marketers can use specific measurement tools to monitor the effect of their social web participation as well as the search engine performance of SEO efforts.

Extend the value of your investment. By involving SEO insight in a social media marketing effort and vice versa, marketers, public relations and advertisers can extend the value of their investment. Well optimized social media content marketing efforts can attract new network participants via search and help increase sales.Advertisers and companies that fund social media campaigns can continue to realize the traffic benefit from optimized interactive content long after the campaign has ended.

Search Engine Optimization