by Thu Nguyen

Created on: September 17, 2010   Last Updated: September 20, 2010

Social media is quickly taking over the internet airwaves. Every time you see the buttons which show how many tweets, likes, shares or digs, the more numbers they have, the more attractive the information on the website becomes. Can you imagine the quantity of visitors who have taken out the time to bookmark these links? Or even how much members are residing beyond each service? This really goes to show that one of the most essential part of any website conversion requires social interaction. This is especially true when search engine rankings is part of the agenda.

Everyday, search engine optimization (SEO) methods are being used online. The competition to get to the top of Google is never ending. While most of the click-through only happens on the first page, the large number of results have nothing to do with the person searching for information online. Truth is the majority of the users searching for something rarely ever go past the first page. So the sites that do end up at the top of the searches normally takes up a large stream of the traffic. This can be a disappointment for users who want some of the attention.

How then does social marketing play a role in enabling this?

Each time an article is visited by a user, the potential to which it will be shared depends on one thing - comments. So as more visitors leave their feedback, if and only if the website they’re on has enabled their links to be ‘dofollow’ and the buttons for the social networks are displayed, this helps influence the interaction to promote sharing. Furthermore, the incentive to comment then leads to bigger conversations which can then be carried over to the commentator’s site.

That’s why it’s equally important for commentators who do consider leaving feedback to say something of valuable content. Thus, social bookmarking through Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious and so on has made it possible to further spread the influence. In turn, the commentators who take the time to leave their feedback will 10 times more likely be sharing the same information with their followers on the various social networks they’re involved with.

So next time you visit a site and notice the number of the bookmarks made, take a look at the feedback as well. The correlation between both is really interesting to see as they are an important part of the search engine optimization process through which a website will rank well. Furthermore, the number of visitors who vote and share with one another their links are more than likely to share again the same link to their followers. The result is a cycle of viral shares that makes social marketing an attractive strategy for SEO.

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