Social Marketing Strategies from Social Marketing Expert Peter Lenkefi

How can you decide which way is the best way to optimize your website?

With all of the information available to you, and all of the choices, you don’t just want to have a trial-and-error way of figuring things out, right?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is basically the idea of increasing and improving traffic to your website through the use of keywords, content, and links.

Here’s how it works: Your site gets picked up by search engines when people search for certain keywords contained within your site. Rankings in the search engine results are dependent on many factors, including number of links, relevant content, activity, number of visitors, and other factors.

Social media optimization is a technique using “word-of-mouth” advertising and viral marketing to promote your website.

Here’s how it works: Your site gets bookmarked by people who find it interesting or helpful; the more times you are noticed, or bookmarked, the more popular you become. You get links from other people, some are comments, some are trackbacks, but you will gain links this way. More popularity brings more visitors, gets you a higher ranking.

SEO techniques were some of the first ones used by Internet marketers.

Many, many people have found tremendous success by sticking to these strategies and methodically learning about them and following the tips from the pros.

This is considered a more “organic” approach, since traffic is driven to your site based primarily on the content of your site.

Generally speaking, anyone clicking through to your site (if you’ve used good SEO) is a potential customer—they’ve been looking for exactly what you have to offer, and here you are at the top of the search engine results…….of course, there are some pretty shady SEO techniques out there, and using those methods may not get you the same amazing results.

Cutting corners doesn’t work in this industry.

While newer to the game, social media optimization (SMO) techniques bring a slightly different twist in, by maximizing the effects of the growing social Internet.

Seeing as most of the traffic on the Internet is to and from these social media sites, it’s a brilliant idea to use that traffic for marketing purposes and drive it right to your site.

One minor problem right now with SMO is that much of your traffic generated through SMO techniques may not be “customer” traffic at this point, because it’s coming from “social” networks that are not purely identified yet.

However, this strategy is quickly gaining speed, and the availability of networks and affiliate programs continues to increase, allowing connections between like-minded folks to occur more frequently.

Right now, most of the pros will agree that an eclectic approach to Internet marketing is probably the best way to get your website out there and start experiencing success.

Carefully choosing the best techniques, learning all of the “ins and outs” of those techniques, having a load of patience, and sticking to your plan will pay off in the long run. There is no quick answer for Internet marketing, and you can’t fool the Web!

Stick with these techniques long enough, and they will work!