May 13, 2009

There are several major levers that can impact how many visitors check out a website.  One is social media, which encompasses web tools like Facebook and Twitter that help people share information.  Another is search engine optimization, or SEO, which refers to traffic generated from search engines. By producing good, relevant content with descriptive keywords, websites can be picked up by search engines and rise in their rankings.  The higher the ranking for a keyword, the more web traffic a website receives.

Generally, people don’t think of social media and SEO as being interconnected, when in fact one can dramatically affect the other.  When creating a web traffic strategy, understanding the relationship between SEO and social media is vital to bringing new visitors and acquiring new customers over the long haul.

How does social media affect SEO? 

One of the most important factors in search engine rankings is inbound linking.  When anyone links to your website, search engines pick up on this.  For most search engines, a link is like a vote of confidence and for each vote of confidence, Google and other engines rank that webpage higher because more people have shown interest in it.

When it comes to social media, millions of links are shared every day on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and blogs.  As more people share a link to a website, the ranking of the webpage will increase.  So the more your links are shared via social media, the more search engines pick up on this and increase your website’s overall rank.

It’s also important to note SEO’s impact on social media.  Primarily, if a link is easier to find on a search engine, then people are more likely to share it.  Social media and SEO are complimentary forces that can build website traffic in dramatic fashion.  If you are building a website that will depend on web traffic, strong familiarity with both will take your website very far.