SEO vs. SMO

Search engine optimization (SEO) and social media optimization (SMO) are two of the bigger concerns for webmasters and bloggers, as they can both have substantial impacts on the amount of traffic a website or blog receives. But does optimizing your site for search engines hinder your SMO efforts (and vice versa) or can they co-exist? And what are the similarities and differences between the two?

SEO has been a common activity of website owners for years now. Although search engine optimization still remains largely a mystery to many webmasters and bloggers, its basic concepts have been, and still are, fairly simple. While SEO is no doubt effective, a relatively small number of websites are optimized due to a general lack of knowledge and a high price tag for most professional services. In addition to the cost, SEO is ignored by some because it is difficult to produce immediate results, and real growth in search traffic takes time.

What’s so great about search engine traffic?

1. Search engines send tons of free traffic to those with high rankings for popular search terms.
2. Traffic is targeted since the visitors have searched for what you have to offer.
3. With continued development of a site search engine traffic should increase with trust and new pages being added.
4. You have control over which search terms you are targeting.
5. Once established, a strong authority site can quickly achieve high rankings for brand new pages (example Wikipedia).

Social media optimization has only become popular in the past few years as the use of social networking sites has exploded. When compared with successful SEO, social media traffic is less steady. Although those who use social media effectively can consistently draw traffic with new content, even the best SMO experts experience large peaks and valleys in terms of traffic. But fortunately, the peaks will be very high.

One of the biggest differences between SEO and SMO is the networking aspect. SMO is heavily-reliant on networking and strong profiles, while SEO can be done without this.

What’s so great about traffic from social media?

1. Anyone can do it.
2. Success can be accomplished from day one of a new website or blog. There’s no need to wait to become a trusted domain.
3. The highs in traffic can be very high.
4. It’s free.
5. You’ll make valuable contacts along the way.
6. A power profile will allow you to get traffic just about whenever you need it (with certain sites).
7. You can help others in the process (and they’re not necessarily your competition like with search engine rankings).
8. The traffic snowballs. Those who are successful draw large audiences. Large audiences can lead to more success with social media and increased visibility.
9. The structure of your website isn’t really important like it is with SEO.

Some Comparisons and Similarities of SEO and SMO:

Link Building:
SEO – Inbound links are a large determining factor in rankings.
SMO – Links are a result of success, which means that SEO benefits from good SMO.

On Page Elements:
SEO – Title tags, headers, image title, bold text and use of keywords are all influential on search engine rankings.
SMO – Coding and tags are not so important, while visual attention grabbers make a bigger impact.

Titles:
SEO – The title tag of a page tells the search engines what a page is about and carries a lot of weight in the rankings.
SMO – Titles and headlines are extremely important for grabbing attention and getting users to click-through.

Content Must be Easily Readable
SEO – By search engine spiders.
SMO – By human readers.

Content:
SEO – Quality content is important in order to rank well.
SMO – Quality content is important in order to hold the readers’ attention and win their approval.

Content Plus:
SEO – Content alone will not produce high rankings. The structure of the site must also be sound.
SMO – While quality content is essential, visual presentation can also make a big difference.

Analysis:
SEO – Analysis is necessary in order to know which changes have made an impact (positive or negative) on the site’s rankings.
SMO – Analysis is necessary to know what types of content draws interest.

Predictability / the Benefit of Experience:
SEO – Experts are able to reproduce success with new sites (although it’s not as easy as it sounds), as the same elements can be applied.
SMO – Those who know the social media audience can recreate success by publishing posts and headlines specifically for this purpose.

Success Breeds More Success:
SEO – Trusted domains will have a positive effect on all pages, including new pages.
SMO – Power profiles on sites like Digg can keep traffic flowing with new submissions.

Can SEO and SMO Co-Exist?

Although the title of this article is “SEO vs. SMO”, I really think that the two work together rather than separately. Link building is probably the best example. Pages and sites that are popular with major social media sites like Digg and del.icio.us will usually receive a lot of inbound links. Those links are a direct result of SMO, but they can have a significant impact on search engine rankings.

New websites and blogs need to start getting quality inbound links in order to start getting search engine traffic. Why not use social media to promote this content, make it visible to as many people as possible, and draw inbound links?

I believe that SMO is the best way (at least it’s the best free method) for new websites and blogs to draw visitors. This early success with social media can have long-lasting effects on search engine rankings as well.

Off-page Optimization SEO Services

Directory Submission – The most prominent off-page workout will include directory submission. Submitting your website to the top directories like DMOZ, Yahoo, and several other more will bring you good result with better traffic volume. Though it takes several months to list your website, they clearly explicate the potential difference with respect to search volume and traffic ratio.

Search Engine Submission – Next importantly, you should submit your website to search engines in order to get indexed. It generally takes couple of weeks for your website to get indexed. It is good and wise to submit you website to all the top renowned search engines including Google, Yahoo, MSN and several other more.

Article Writing and Submission – The most important off-page work will include article writing and submission to article directories. Article writing is one of the best practices to achieve remarkable traffic. It also helps to gain effective back links and moreover it makes your website incredibly familiar in search engines.

Press Release – Writing an informative and interesting press release and submitting to press release website is one among the off-page optimization work. The better press release you write, the better your website will get listed in the web.

Forum Posting – As known well, forum is the best place to interact with each other. You can make your active participation in forums, so that you can link back to your website, while giving your answers in the discussion place.

Link Building – A professional search engine optimizer will know the essence of link building and its outcomes. Link building helps to generate the link popularity, whereby it helps to get remarkable search engine results.

Reciprocal link exchange – The other essential off-page optimization practice will include reciprocal linking. Reciprocal link exchange is quite simple to handle, as it could be achieved with mutual understanding of the other webmaster.

Orkut Promotion – Community websites are one of the best places to publicize your services and product online. Promote your website in all major community websites, so that the website will receive excellent search volume and traffic ratio.

Social Book Marking – The best method of handling to drive brilliant search volume could be achieved through social book marking. Dig your website in several book marking sites including digger.com, delicious and several other more.

Features of On Page Optimization

Title Tag: This is an area in a web page where the text is placed that shows the title of the website on the very top of the web browser window. Search engines use title tags to make a link in search results.

 Meta tag description: A Meta Tag Description is a part of web page coding that gives the basic description about the website. This should focus on the website because Meta tag description plays a very important role in web page ranking.

 Meta Tag Keywords: Meta Tag Keywords play the similar role as meta tag description for highlighting the importance of a website.

Keyword Density: A particular percentage of keywords used on a web page are called keyword density. A keyword must be used in a web page from 2% to 8 % for good page ranking. This technique is the backbone of Search Engine Optimization.

URL Structure: If you want your website to rank well then your URL of website must be related to the context of the website.

Image Alt Tag : For getting higher rank it is must that you put alt tag for your image which help search engines to understand which related that image is.

Converting a big site to new friendly url structure

Well if you have ever taken on an SEO project that involves converting a large (meaning many many thousands of pages) site to a new architecture you know how difficult this can be. The temptation is to just not do it and try to work with the existing pages. Also, the issue of mapping the old URLs with valid 301 redirects is challenging as well.

                                      

Here are some steps when taking on this task.

1) First make sure to get a good crawl of the existing site.  This will tell you whats out there. I recently had to do this with a site that had cleverly programmed over 1.5 million pages. Of course google only had around 1,000 of them in their index but they were still ‘accessible’ and this had to be changed as these were doorways into the old site architecture. If these were to be left open this could create issues for duplicate content.

2) Once you have the URL’s you’ll need to determine the unique ID’s that are used to drive the existing architecture. You’ll need to know these so you can either use them for your re-writes or in my most recent case it was a conversion from ASP to PHP which meant I could not use ANY of the existing logic since it was all using recordsets etc etc. So, I had to create an export based on the crawl that kept the product and category ID’s intact and used those to import into the new database that would drive the site.

3) Once you have the tables you can then either desing the new database from this or , as I did,  programmatically create rewrites in the .htaccess that will handle all of these pages. Be sure to check for long URL’s with multiple queries parameters and be sure to forward all of these to either their corresponding pages or the parent ID’s of these pages.

4) When testing on the new site you can use the <base href=”??????”/> so that the rewrites will work while testing.

5) Run a new crawl on the new site and verify all things work

6) Check your redirects in something like Redirect Checker so you can be sure you get 301’s instead of 404 or 302’s. The 301 is the accepted method of redirecting. It also allows the PR from those old pages to pass on to the new pages.

6 Powerful SEO Tips for Beginners

1. Title Link and Text
The link of your title should not be a number like – ( http://xyz.com/123.html ) or random letters of the alphabet. This is a poor SEO technique and will affect you rankings horribly. A good permalink structure does have an impact on SEO.


Instead, include the keywords of your post title in the title link. When we compare two URL’s http://xyz.com/123.html and http://xyz.com/powerful-tips-for-beginners.html, which makes more sense? Surely, the second URL makes more sense and it’s good from a SEO and user prospective.


So you should always try putting in some keywords related to the content on that page in your URL? Once you have chosen keywords to include in the URL, write out the title of your post. You will have some keywords to work, so it will make it a little easier on you.


When talking about one of the most important factors of good SEO, we talk about the title of the page. By looking at the title of your page in search engine results, people should be able to make decision about the kind of content they have in store on that page for them. So again include your main keywords in your title, but don’t make it spammy by including too many keywords or by making it read as gibberish.


2. Keywords
If you want your post to appear on search engines for certain keywords then make sure that these keywords appear often in your post. You should skillfully incorporate the keyword into your post five to six times – without making it look artificial for your readers.


But be careful, don’t use the keywords too much or the search engine spider may suspect spam. And if you are creating friendly content, have your keywords in your content where they fit in naturally. And please keep your keyword density lower than 2 percent!


3. Quality Links
It is important that your blog is linked from various high quality websites, as this will increase your number of backlinks (link to a previous post) which has great SEO benefits


At the same time, if your site is linked to undesirable sites such as link farms, bad neighborhoods, etc. then it will have a negative effect on your search engine rankings.


So link to authority and trusted websites only so that your website outgoing profile becomes stronger. And at the same time, get links from quality websites and blogs only. You can grab some quality links for your website by submitting your content on ezine publishing websites, guest posts, genuine blog commenting on the blogs in your niche and getting links from other bloggers.


4. Image Alt Tag
Always add an ALT tag to your images when you insert an image. This is important as there is a lot of traffic that is to be gained from indexed images as well.


An ALT tag is basically an alternative description of your image and it is crawled by search engine spiders.


Using ALT text with an image is important as people will be able to see some text when they are having image off on their systems or when see in an email body. And in the absence of ALT text, they will not get any information about the image you placed on a page or email content if they don’t prefer seeing image from an email or page they browse.


5. Use Anchor Text
When you interlink your pages in the blog, be sure to add proper anchor text. Anchor text is basically a word that is related to the post that you have linked it to; in other words: keywords.


Suppose you have a post about toy making, and use the anchor text, sell toys in any of your posts that link to it. When search engines visit your site and see that anchor text, they follow it, and know your page is about selling toys.


6. Interlink Your Pages
Bloggers are so obsessed with getting quality links from other blogs that they forget that the most basic step of SEO: interlinking pages.


This can do a number of things for you. By interlinking, you are basically selecting keywords in your article and linking them to another page on your blog. You can do this with old articles, pages on your blog, etc. This increases the pageviews on your blog, and makes it easier for search engines to travel deep into your blog.

SEO Tricks -Increasing traffic with Low competition keywords

30 SEO Tips for 30 Days

Tip [1] Add Titles related to targeted keywords

Add Titles related to targeted keywords, place only important keywords, do not exceed more than 64 - 80 characters.

Title tag in Search engine listings:

Broadly speaking:

Each page should have a unique title specified in <TITLE> tag.
Each page title should contain a set of relevant keywords including the primary keyword phrase used in that page. However, title should make sense and not be stuffed with keywords for the sake of it.

Some of the tools to find keywords are Google keyword tool, Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery.

Tip [2] Meta description should be unique for each pages with targeted keywords

Meta description should be unique for each pages with targeted keywords. Do not stuff keywords into Meta description.

 

Broadly speaking:

META description tag should be a well-written summary of the page written for the website visitors rather than the search engine. It should be no longer than 250 characters.

Description tag is sometimes used by search engines on their SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). Well-written description tag will encourage potential visitor to click through to your website. Well-written META tags can enhance ranking on search engines that use META tags to determine relevancy of the page. 

Tip [3] Study your competitor’s plan of action

 

Research and study your competitor’s plan of action, their keywords and the success rate for those business keywords and work accordingly

Tip [4] Headings (<H1> to <H6>) and paragraphs (<P>)

 

Each web page should be structured using structural mark-up such as headings (<H1> to <H6>) and paragraphs (<P>). Headings should be meaningful and include keywords.

Tip [5] Bread crumbs

 

Implement Bread crumbs for increasing web site navigation structure

Example: Home >> Internet >> SEO >> 30 SEO Tips for 30 Days

Tip [6] Header and footer navigation links

 

Create Static Header and footer navigation links. Links should be in text and avoid in images.

Tip [7] Keywords Analysis

 

Analyze your targeted keywords using Google suggest.

 

Tip [8] Keywords in navigational links

 

Keywords in navigational links play a vital role and have its own importance to search engine eyes.

Tip [9] Keyword in file name or URL

 

Use most important keyword in file name or URL. Keywords in folder and file names should be separated with hyphen (-) or underscore (_), Example: 30-seo-tips-for-30-days.html

Tip [10] Minimize table especially nested tables

Tip [11] Say yes to Quality links and No to Quantity links

Tip [12] Never try to place hundreds of link for a new site on the very first day

Tip [13] Your targeted keywords need to vary a lot in anchors

Tip [14] Always have a good combination of links from new and old sites / directories

Tip [15] Try writing articles having links and have them in the resource page of your site

Tip [16] Images are important, make sure your site logo contains your keyword

Tip [17] Put CSS and JavaScript into external file / folder 

Ideally CSS should be stored as an external file. This has the following benefits:

• The web pages are uncluttered,
• Files are smaller,
• Files are easier to maintain,
• Any errors in CSS would not cause problems for search engines when collecting the web pages

Tip [18] Pay special attention to your content

Tip [19] Make sure to have sitemap as text links

Tip [20] Place robots.txt in root on your server 

Broadly speaking:

 

Make sure you have a robots.txt file in the root of your web server. This will tell the search engines to index your site and which pages they should index.  Well-behaved spiders will always check this file first.

 

Standard contents for robots.txt file are as follows:

 

User-agent: *

Disallow:

Tip [21] Broken links and measure server downtime

Tip [23] Blogging

 

Start a blog and participate with other related blogs, may be you can try one of the below Blog platform,

 

   

 

Tip [22] Directories Submission

 

Submit sites to Dmoz , Yahoo directory, Local Directories, Regional Directories, Business Directories, Craigs list, Classifieds and Yellow Pages.

Tip [24] Feed Creation and Submission

 

Create feed rss xml and ror xml file and submit to xml search engines and directories.

Tip [25] Try to avoid automatic directory submission and build manual links

Tip [26] Monitor your hits and traffic by using free Google analytics

 

Features available are, 

(1) Advanced Segmentation
(2) Motion Charts
(3) Custom Reports
(4) Fast Implementation
(5) Keyword and Campaign Comparison
(6) Custom Dashboards
(7) AdWords Integration
(8) Internal Site Search
(9) Benchmarking
(10) Trend and Date Slider
(11) Ecommerce Tracking
(12) Funnel Visualization
(13) Site Overlay
(14) Email reports
(15) GeoTargeting

more details can be found here Google Analytics Features.

Tip [27] Know how to analyze the reports and to optimize the results

Tip [28] Redirection methods and theory

 

Know about redirection methods and theory - 301, 302, and 200 response codes.

Tip [29] Google Webmaster Tool

 

Create Google site map to your web site and configure to Google Webmaster Tool.

Tip [30] Website analytics reports

 

Implement, understand and react to website analytics reports.

 

If you need these SEO tips in your site or blog as Gadget, feel free to use my SEO Tips of the Day Google Gadget that displays one SEO tip a day in your web page that can even help your site visitors to learn SEO tips. To get SEO and other Internet marketing Tweets follow me @jagadeeshmp , thanks for your time.