For businesses there was a time when social media and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) were looked at separately.  SEO was taking diligent notes in the Honors Calculus class while social media was making sure everyone wore team colors to the football game.  Now we are seeing the brains and the beauty joining together to be prom King and Queen.  How did we arrive here, and what will the future bring?

There are many elements of a strong SEO strategy that have been constant over the years.  Your website still needs to be easy to crawl by search engines, meaning; no missing pages, redirects in place where needed, no missing meta descriptions, clear title tags, and keywords baked into page content, titles and headers.  Thorough research on targeted keywords is still a necessity as you want to assure you are targeting the right words/phrases for your target audience and you want your on-page content to align with those keywords.  A well built back-end to your web pages is the foundation for strong SEO, but how do you remain relevant and continue to increase in popularity?  Social media walks into the classroom and all eyes slowly look up from the textbook…

Looking good social media!  Put on some Al Green and ‘Let’s Stay Together’.

Content creation is the most important aspect of ongoing SEO and social media campaigns.  Search engines don’t want to see the same stale, stagnant pages on your website and you want to give users reasons to visit your site and your social media platforms.  Content is King, we’ve all heard that phrase plenty over the years, now the King has a Queen (social media) and she is here to tell the online world about your fresh content.  Cross-promotion of content on social media platforms (Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and YouTube to name a few) has become the best way to be seen by users and by search engines.  Creating natural links between social platforms and your website will greatly improve the impressions your content is making, improving your visibility and popularity online.

At minimum, we can now safely say that SEO and social media are “in a relationship” and the future looks bright and prosperous for the two moving forward.  This is a dance you can’t afford to miss!