Over last couple years we have seen an explosion in in social media. Today we are going to I explore social media and understand how to use it to gain more traffic through search engine optimization.
If you look at Alexa.com and see the top ranking sites in the world. You’ll notice among the top 20 are social media sites YouTube.com Facebook.com Myspace.com & Twitter.com. Which means most people who are online visit one of these social media sites. These sites have the most people and therefore the most traffic. And where there’s people there is money.
So if you’re an affiliate marketer or you have a company that sells a product or service, then you really want to understand “What social media is?”, and “How to use it to get more traffic and more visitors to purchase your product or service?”.
We’ve all heard the term Web 2.0 or social media we think we know what it is. Do you know? Have you broken down to the core? I think a good definition for social media/web 2.0 is “user generated content” With this form of media the user themselves are the ones who generate the content, give feedback & make referrals.
But the mistake that most people make is there’s more than one type of social media and we’re going to talk about three types today, socially created content, socially highlighted content, and social networking.
Socially created content include websites like WordPress.com, Flickr.com, YouTube.com and 100’s of other content sharing sites. On these sites the user generates content in the form of written word, document sharing, image sharing, video creation, and even audio/podcast. The benefit for the user is they get to broadcast their ideas, concepts and endorsements with the rest of the online community. The benefits to the sites as they get content developed weather site that gets indexed in the search engines and gains more traffic. And these sites get to montizes traffic through advertising.
Socially highlighted content include websites like Yahoo Buzz.com, Google bookmarks.com, digg.com, mixx.com and 100’s of others. These sites are commonly referred to as bookmarking sites. The user bookmarks content that they find on the Internet that’s interesting to them and they want to share those sites and URLs with others who may be interested in the same topic or subject. In exchange the websites receive more traffic they are indexed in the search engines. The second feature of these bookmarking sites are the subcommunities, many times they have loyal followers. Such as digg.com that has a large following of avid users and allow their users to vote on content that is bookmark on the website. Many times being on the first page of digg.com will give a website a lot of referral traffic.
Social networking includes sites like Myspace.com, Facebook.com, Linkedin.com and 100’s of other websites. These websites work much like networking works in the real world. The user exchanges contact information with other users and builds connections and contacts. The users can communicate with one another and they can share information with one another. The benefits to the website is they get to gain more traffic and have a loyal user base that continues to come back in user service on a daily basis.
Not all websites fall into just one of these categories in fact many fall into all three. Websites like twitter.com can act as socially critic contact, socially highlighted content and a social networking tool. In fact most of the social media out there all act as a social networking tools, allowing users to add friends in associates to their contact list.
The great thing about social media is users can use it for their own search engine optimization benefits. Users can post information to a socially contest site such as Youtube.com and then bookmark it on a socially highlighted content website and then share it with their friends on a social networking sites.
It’s the combination of using all three media types together that will allows your content to gain more ranking in the search engines therefore yielding more traffic to your website.