Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process by which website is modified and optimized to meet the demands of search engines. This enables the search engines to find the website when a search is made for that particular keyword.
Social media optimization (SMO) is a method in which traffic is generated by using the social networking websites, online communities, forums, blogs, business networking websites etc.
What you need to know about SEO and SMO.
1. Both these methods are used to drive traffic to your website.
2. SMO is aimed at impressing human being and SEO is aimed at impressing search engines. Both ways the core aim is to generate more business leads.
3. The website needs to be optimized and changes according to the search engine demands for SEO, but for SMO, it is completely depended on the activities that are done at the social networking websites.
4. SEO has evolved during the late 90s but SMO has become popular only after 2005.
5. SMO can be handled by any person who has a little bit of knowledge about social networking website. For SEO, a company will need to hire professionals who are very well experienced.
How to Make Your Website Search Engine Friendly
Search engines still remain as the favorite option of many people when they need new information. This fact makes it necessary for every website to be SEO friendly. However, there is a lot of misconception about SEO.
Many people adhere to ethical practices for immediate results. These unethical practices will not give you a long time benefit and at the same time, it may end in a total ban on your site.
Even in white hat methods, many people are making a lot of mistakes which affect the website optimization. Here are some tips for a better website optimization.
Enhance user Interface and User Experience:
Provide the best user interface and user experience is a good step to make your site highly optimized. Most of the webmasters are aiming at search engines while designing a site and not at the real users. However, the changed algorithms give more importance to the user experience.
Reduce images and graphics:
The website should be fast loading. You can reduce the images and graphics and use contents instead. You may feel that a website will be more attractive when filled with attractive images and graphics.
It is not so and a person who visits the website need information. Provide the necessary information with a lesser load so that the website will be fast and informative.
Social Media Participation:
All search engines started giving preference to the visitor’s experience and social signals are being considered to evaluate the credibility of a website. Thus Social Media gained an importance in the recent time in the search algorithms.
Blogs:
Create blogs to provide required information to the user. Search engines have started evaluating how well a page is solving a problem of a visitor. The search engines love the blogs.
Informative content:
Start designing pages aiming at the visitors. Gone are the days of keyword density. Search engines are no more interested in calculating the keyword density. A keyword in the title is enough, provided the content talks something worth about it.
Now the searching algorithms have been redesigned to give more importance to repeat visitors. Your website can have repeated visitors only when you have content worth reading. You need high-quality content to achieve higher rankings.
Proper redirection:
Avoid multiple pages with similar contents. This may divide the visitors to different pages and thus affect the page ranking adversely. And should try to avoid maximum redirects as too many redirects give an impression that the pages are unstable.
Google + Authorship: Try to have a Google + authorship. Google + may be a not so popular social networking site, but the Google Search has immense access to it.
It can identify each account in Google + and can make out whether it is being operated by a human being or a spam. This is one of the main criteria in the search algorithm of Google.
Quality links:
Building too many links within a short time will give an indication to the search engines that it is quite unnatural. This will certainly affect the page ranking in the long run.
Content Marketing:
Content Marketing is an important step to enhance optimization. In reality, this strategy will help to improve your business in two ways. One is to increase the traffic to your site through backlinks and secondly, it plays an important role in brand image building.
Building brand image will help you to increase your business and at the same time to increase the traffic to your website as the website of a known brand will always be the first target of any visitor who is in search of similar products.
Mobile-Friendly Website:
The mobile-friendly website is the new trend because more and more people use their mobile devices to search online for information, video, entertainment, etc. With a mobile-friendly website, you will increase easily traffic and higher rankings.