Guest Post: SEO or Social networking: Which one should you pick for internet marketing?

When you are trying to analyze the benefits of social networking vs SEO techniques in managing your business marketing, popularity and change become the two very important aspects to address. Internet users experience a change quite often not only in the way it is used, but also the ways of deciding a strategy for marketing your site. SEO and social networking are two most common as well as affordable techniques, which are not only easy to execute but provide a wide scope of different advantages and disadvantages. Those businesses who are always up-to-date with the aspects of both popularity and change in their marketplace will always lead their company towards a better marketing path.

The How
Search engine optimization covers a lot of things, but it boils down to mainly two things which are: on-page optimization and off-page optimization. The former is all about making your site search engine friendly with the right content and proper linking throughout the pages. Off-page on the other hand deals with creating links going to your website. With plenty of quality links going to your site, search engines would infer that you have something good to offer since sites are referring to you.
Social networking is all about, well, networking. It’s like “word of mouth” advertising – except it’s online. If you know some people that know some people that know some other people too, imagine if all those people visited your site. That is the premise for social networking being used to generate traffic. So, you have to go to sites designed for networking and meet new people, gain their trust, and refer them to your site, then also ask if it would be okay for them to share your site to their friends.

The Potential
With SEO, your main goal is to reach the top of search engine result pages. Always look for a keyword or phrase which gets millions of searches per month. This would increase your chances of getting a better ranking pretty soon. Having a top spot for your keyword which is already popular in the market, the amount of traffic generated out of it will be huge as well. Achieving this for at least a couple of more keywords can generate tons of traffic for your site.
With social networking, you start small. Let’s say you started with one person and that individual really liked your site and he told a couple of his friends to check your site out. And then, the two friends also loved your site and also referred a couple of their friends. Your site’s traffic has the potential to grow exponentially in a short amount of time.

Email marketing: It is still important!
Apart from SEO and social networking means, email marketing has an important significance in the internet marketing domain. Organizations should focus on developing a fixed newsletter frequency which must cater to its target audiences. This will lead to capture the attention of the target clients. Just to refer, it is a common practice that a visitor comes to your blog/site and within a second switches to other one. To redirect the visitors and to attract new and potential customers, it is beneficial to transform passive blogging to active newsletter program.
Summarizing the whole concept, SEO and social networking techniques both constitute to be very essential for you online business success. Considering both the options will further boost the marketing program for your blog or e-commerce business. Although it does take some time and should not be rushed through. No matter what you choose, SEO or social networking, you should just try to strive harder in achieving your targets.

About the author
Alyssa Clarke is a blogger who also happens to be a tech freak. She loves spending on tech stuff and recently bought a new Nokia E71. She is a car lover too and her dream machine is Bentley Azure.