Building a web presence that will help your business : SEO & SMM applied

Have you ever asked yourself what you need in order to succeed in an online business ? What are the factors that influence our presence on the Internet ? Do we need a strategy or we can go with the flow and just interact with others ? These are basic questions that you need not only to answer for your business but you also have to believe in the answers you get. Because based on those answers you will build your online attitude and your entire strategy. So : trust yourself and keep on going with your plan but leave enough room for small adjustments on the way.

Why do you need SEO to build your presence on the Internet

SEO is the first thing that you’ll hear about when talking on how to get your website and your business known on the Internet. That is why we’ll first concentrate on SEO and what exactly it can do for your business. I will only concentrate on general things and if you like more details you can read some of the articles on my blog or you can just send me an e-mail to bonciutoma@yahoo.com

But lets get back to our subject. SEO is a huge industry and it’s services will help improve the rankings of your website on search engines. An effective SEO campaign will help your website to get good rankings in Google on keywords that are offering enough search volume in order to get traffic. This is the most important thing you have to watch out : SEO costs money – don’t waste it on keywords that don’t produce traffic.

It’s like in real life : selling for example computers at the meat market will not help your business. SEO basically puts your website – this means your business, your products, your services – on the first page of Google. It’s not important to be number one in Google : it’s important to be on the first page for as many relevant keywords as you can. If someone will search for different bikes and different accessories for bikes and you are always on the first page your presence will be noticed.

Although it’s not something that can be totally placed under SEO, creating interesting and appealing titles along with interesting description metatag can greatly impact your traffic. Having cool titles and great description and a first page presence it’s more then enough to start receiving traffic. Quality traffic comes from targeting relevant keywords so this is the second thing an SEO service should offer.

Why do you need SMM

SMM stands for Social Media Marketing and means what it says : web marketing using social media. Many people talk about social media but they don’t realize that there are several social tools out there and each and everyone of it has it’s own features and can offer specific benefits.

Your blog is the most important social tool you can use to promote your business. It’s easy to use, it offers correct indexing by search engines and is user friendly. Why a blog is a social tool ? Because just like any other social network it can build a community around your articles. The blog is like your home – the place where you hang on the most. Here you can share your knowledge, your services and your ideas. Take good care of your blog in order to succeed. SEO gets you good rankings. Blogs can get you readers and potential clients. This is the content that it’s gonna be spread on the web.

Social networks are another tool. And there are so many types out there : microblogging (Twitter), links sharing (StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Delicious), video sharing (YouTube, Viddler, Vimeo), photo sharing (Flickr, TwitPic), general socialization with photos and video (FaceBook, MySpace), business networks (LinkedIn). And these are not the only ones : these are only the ones I use. Your activity on these social networks has to be more casual. You are not on a suit and tie any more. You are on a party meeting people, sharing ideas and occasionally taking about yourself and your business.

On these social networks you will talk about many things and from time to time you’ll be talking about yourself and your home and what you like to do there : this is about your blog and what you are writing about. Think casual and just step up to people participating on the party and just say hi.

How your social activity can help or damage your business

Remember that all you do and say has a great impact on your business. Think that if you say an interesting thing on social media it will be forgotten in 10 minutes but if you say something bad people will remember you a little bit more. Try and develop your presence based on a positive approach. Don’t criticize others and don’t talk bad things about your competition.

Concentrate only on what you can do for others and how you can solve other people problems with your knowledge and your services or products. Usually if you think happy thoughts then good things will start to happen to you. All the things that could damage your business in real life apply on social media also. The difference between these two comes when you are trying to build a presence on these social networks and you start to realize that it takes time, patience and strategy.

Strategy is something you have to take into account. You can do it without it, by just having few guidelines to conduct your posts but a strategy would be much more helpful. It will use the same guidelines but in addition to that will contain ways by which you’ll try to measure your success on social networks. For example I use TwitPic to test how many of my Twitter followers are reacting to my links at different moments of the day. Small things that count in the end.

Be aware of the difference between real life and the social media reality

I will explain the difference between real life and social media by an example. Lets say you are helping ten people in real life and after that you are going on a trip for 6 months. When you get back all your friends and the people you helped will say at least hello and ask you how are you, where you’ve been and stuff like that. Social media works in a different way : if you are not posting for 6 months you lose everything. Unless your name is Gary Vaynerchuk in which case you’ll get 100 comments on your blog post after 6 months of silence.

So building a presence on social networks is not an easy task. Takes time, patience and a strategy in how you approach people. Setting few goals will help the process of establishing a strategy. You can use social media to improve your image as a business or you can work on the image of the service or product you offer or improve your traffic or just to search potential clients or potential B2B opportunities. It’s up to you to decide what you are after and how you plan to achieve it.

Time – Patience – Strategy : Do you think it’s enough ?

So SEO and SMM are essential. What do you think ? What are you after in your social media adventure. Did you got it or are you still working on that. Do you have a strategy ? Share your ideas with me and maybe I can help you find an answer.