With all of the information available about how to make your site appear at the top of a search engine results page, one could assume that as an e-commerce site, you’re pulling out all of the stops to make that happen.
What if you’re doing everything and you’re still not on top? Consider what you’re doing with your social media campaigns.
By now, you should know that the two biggest things you can do with your site to help optimize your site are:
- Make sure you are using the correct keywords and phrases.
- Make sure you are linking to your current content.
Linking to your current content is the perfect entry point for social media.
Consider the upcoming holiday season.
Let’s assume you’re on Twitter and Facebook. Are you posting at least a few times a week to invite people to your site to check out your products or services? Are you online asking questions of your readers or followers? Are you asking them to take action?
Consider hosting holiday specials on your site. Use your Facebook fans and Twitter followers to get the word out about the specials and any contests you may have coming up.
The more you entice potential customers to come to your site, the more inbound traffic you’ll receive. This, in turn, results in higher search engine rank.
I’ve mentioned 1800-Flowers.com before as a best practices site, but other sites that have grabbed the social media ball and have run with it include Lands’ End, Ulta (cosmetics), and Old Navy.
With a simple flick of the wrist and a few key strokes, these brands are reaching out to customers as one of the most pivotal times of the buying year.
Shouldn’t you be doing the same?
YOU WROTE:
“The more you entice potential customers to come to your site, the more inbound traffic you’ll receive. This, in turn, results in higher search engine rank.”
This statement is totally wrong…
inbound traffic has nothing to do with Search Engine rankings.
If what you say is true… I could purchase Billions of visits from exit traffic, popunders, etc… and ultimately dominate the number one position for every keyword I choose.
Google and SEO is nowhere near that easy…
the only value in social marketing is word-of-mouth and direct traffic.
You have a good point here. I know that Twitter is starting to feed the engines with results but not sure what Erin was getting at in that statement.
Erin? Can you clarify?
SEO is not an exact science. Google purposefully changes its algorithms periodically as to avoid anyone taking control over any particular keyword or phrase.
However, there are two things that are consistent insofar as how to achieve high search engine results ranking: keywords and links.
Keywords, as expected, will help people find your site.
Links, as Google and other Search Engines see it, are considered a means to show your “expertise” on a certain subject. The more sites, people, things, etc. that link to you (as well as inbound links and outbound links your site has), the more your site appears to be an expert on the topic. Google and the other search engines report query results based on which site seems like the best “expert” on the topic.
While you could buy billions of visits, the tactic would only work in the short term as Google also has been known to punish (for lack of a better word) sites it feels have abused the system. At that point, the sites who appear to have purchased their way to the top are sent to the back of the search engine line.