In the push to build a robust online presence for your business, you will have to familiarize yourself with a comprehensive suite of website promotion techniques.
Online marketing trends are generally divided into two categories: on page optimization and off page optimization.
In the recent past, all you really needed was a sufficient amount of on page optimization as the primary component of an SEO strategy; but in today's competitive business marketplace - this goes for any short-tail keyword and quite a few long-tail keywords as well - only doing on page SEO just won't cut it.
The Rise of Social Media Off page SEO are the things you do to bring visitors to your website that has nothing to do headers, title tags, anchor text; basically, all the things you do make your website look good for the search engine robots that drop by periodically to assess it.
With off-page, you're really trying to bring humans to your site, and this can be done using article marketing, guest blogging, backlink building in general, banners, and the most explosively growing method of building a social media presence.
This last one differs from the others because it doesn't really rely on the search engines; you depend on a digital version of word-of-mouth to help your brand propagate throughout a social network you've established on any number of social sites, with the most powerful being: - Facebook.
This social site is the King, with over 700 million regular users on the planet.
- Twitter.
This social micro-blogging platform counts over 500 million users total; with half of these active.
- LinkedIn.
The eponymous business-oriented social networking website has at least 160 million users registered.
Establishing a presence on all of these sites positions your business in a position to take advantage of a valuable trove of traffic; much of which will be long-term.
Social sites are taking over from all other forms of offsite optimization, precisely because of this longevity; which, as long as you're able to maintain a connection with the network you've built by posting regular updates on amendments to company services, tweeting events and product releases, etc, will grow almost exponentially.
No other form of optimization can compete with social media marketing except search marketing.
The Viral Nature of Social Media The most powerful attribute of social networking isn't the link building that occurs because of it - although this is a considerable benefit - but the fact that the right video pitching your services, or the right tweet that somehow resonates with your public, can go viral.
When this happens, your business is catapulted to new heights traffic-wise, and not even search engine optimization using perfect keywords can contend with this as a form of business exposure.
Going viral happens when many people share your content with their friends, who then share it with their friends, and so on in ever-widening networks.
When you consider the huge numbers of people who are a part of social networks like the ones listed above; it's clear that if you can get the right company to oversee your social strategy, then even the sky might not be the limit if you're successful.
Looking To the Future As explosively growing and dominant as social media is today, the future holds even more promise, given the growing popularity of internet-capable cell phones.
Catching onto the social tidal wave, most phone companies are including in easy social sharing in their newest lines of Smartphones set to hit the market.
This will make the reach of such networks even longer, given that now people can let their friends know immediately about the products or services they try, on the spot.