What is SEO?

We all know SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, but why does SEO exist? Why do so many people spend 40 hours or more a week devoting themselves to SEO? Why do companies list SEO as a marketing strategy, and hire in-house SEOs or agencies to optimize them for search?

The reason is simple- search drives traffic online. No website wants to have a high ranking on Google for any reason other than to drive traffic. Traffic leads to sales, sales lead to profits, profits lead to happy stakeholders. So ultimately, SEO isn't so much about gaining rank on Google, Bing, or any other search engine... it's about driving traffic.

For too long, it has been lamented that social media only has a small or non-existent SEO benefit. In the past, we searched for social media sites that offered do-follow links. (Don't bother- this list is over 2 years old.) More recently, there has been work done on determining if you can use Twitter to speed up the time it takes to index new pages on your site. Search (you'll find this funny later!) for "seo benefits in social media" and you'll find plenty of other articles considering social media properties in terms of SEO benefits.

It's time to stop thinking of in terms of the past.

To be perfectly honest, search seems to have gotten weaker lately, not stronger. Web spam has increasingly penetrated the SERPs seemingly unchecked for quite some time and Google is rapidly integrating Google-spam into results pages. This below image from an SEOBook.com blog entry about disappearing organic results explains the issue well.

 Ultimately, our job is to drive traffic, not rank in Google.

In some ways, search is a bit like the phone. It has completely revolutionized communication and business, and incredible amounts of innovation have come along for the ride. But when the internet came along, a lot of business and communication moved online and the same is happening in traffic building, and will continue to happen as social media becomes an increasingly vital part of bringing in visitors & customers.

Search nowadays is built on a link graph. Links are supposed to be a "vote" or indication of support for a website, and it is the backbone behind the rankings of websites in search. As time has gone by, however, these votes have been purchaseable. They have been put out into the wild en masse through disingenious means. Many SEOs complain that websites rank ahead of the website they are trying to rank through purchasing links, spamming blogs/forums with links, or other "black-hat" tactics.

Social media, on the other hand, is built on a like graph. While there are some of the same issues facing the link graph, overall likes are more genuine than links. Furthermore, the general public has become more likely to like than link. Also, a like typically carries more weight because you can more easily source it- on Facebook you can see who recommends a website, on Digg you can see who originally submitted a web page and have a certain expectation of the quality based on the community. In search, you don't know whether ABC Widgets is being recommended by Consumer Reports or a massive paid link campaign.

At the end of the day, quality will win. If you consistently find unworthy results through search, you will gravitate towards other sources. Google became Google by focusing on quality results and a user-friendly experience. I will not try and tell you Google is any less user friendly today than it was five years ago (that is a debate for another day) but from a user perspective, it feels as if the quality of results is slipping.

The Google is in another castle. When you hear from Google nowadays, it is about local. It is about mobile. It is about Android. It is about Chrome, and Chrome OS. It is about Google Me (social media project.) It is NOT about search. The search market has never been more ripe for disruption. Just as Google knocked out Infoseek, Altavista, Go.com, Lycos, Excite and so many others, someone could come along and knock out Google by providing a better product with more relevant results. I don't know if it will happen, but you need to consider strategies outside of making Google happy.

To cut to the chase, more people are using channels other than search to find out about websites, content, videos, and more. The only reason that social channels do not stand a candle to search right now is that they work on the principle that now is better. No matter how popular content is, no matter how many recommendations it has, tomorrow it is old news and it will disappear. Until the time factor is limited, search will still beat social media.

But still, if you aren't embracing social, you're using the phone while your competitors are sending e-mail. Get with the times, man! Here's how to start:

By Jess3 via Mashable.com 

1) Create a Facebook Fan Page and a Twitter Account.

Twitter's "tweet this" button will specifically ask if you want to follow the account of the website you are tweeting a link from, if that site sets it up that way. Now you've got a pipeline to broadcast your content to interested parties, and engage with them too! Facebook Fan Pages scale as they grow- as you post things to your wall, as you have more people as your fans liking it, more of their fans will start to be exposed it complete with a "personal" recommendation. If they decide to follow the link and "like" your fan page from your website, the cycle continues!

2) Incorporate Facebook "like", Twitter "tweet", Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon and other bookmarking/recommending buttons into your site.

You can do this using the AddThis widget or by incorporating the code from the various sites. All of these sites can bring in significant traffic, and with Digg launching a redesign soon focusing on connections, Digg will not longer be a "front page or bust" traffic opportunity.

3) Create original, fresh content.

Humans generally do a great job of determining what is scraped, made for AdSense content, and what is the original source. If you are a smaller, low-authority site, it is much more likely that you will be rewarded with traffic through social media and bookmarking traffic. Google has said "make original content and search rankings will come" but Google also doesn't have to worry about scrapers ranking ahead of them in SERPs with stolen content. In general, people don't like scrapers. They don't like "Made for AdSense" blogs. They will be your evangelists and point people to the original content source anytime they can.

4) Optimize EVERY page!

Landing page optimization is a popular topic here on SEOMoz and is quickly becoming something more and more SEOs are concerned with beyond title tags, keyword density, and linking structures. You need to realize that because people typically link to an article, a video, a blog post and not your domain that those pages become your landing pages! You need to think about how each page in your site is optimized... does it link to other content a person may be interested in? Does it have sufficient branding? Are you encouraging people to share? Do you offer a call-to-action? If you don't consider each page a landing page, you may bring in a lot of traffic but you'll have a lot of bounces to go with it.

5) Write for your target audience, not a machine.

When you write for a robot, you sometimes don't necessarily make things as user friendly as you could. But when you write for your target audience you will be rewarded in the social channels because people tend to like things that their friends/community likes too. Your content will be delivered by your target audience to a broader, targetted audience, which will share and deliver your content to an even broader, targetted audience.

At the end of the day, we want to increase traffic. Where it comes from doesn't matter that much. If you are ignoring social, or only considering it in terms of direct SEO benefits, you are missing out on huge opportunities both in the short-term and long-term. I implore you to think of social media not as a time waster, but an opportunity to bring a wider audience to your websites, and as the traffic you bring in from those sites grow it will snowball into something wonderful.

This is just a primer to convince you that integrating social in your traffic strategy is wise. I realize many people already have a Twitter account or a Facebook page for their business, but I wanted to cover the basics first. I did not include extensive instructions on how to create a Twitter account or a Facebook page because there are many resources out there. More will come in the future :)

If you would like more information on Facebook marketing, be sure to check out TimSuolo's excellent Guide to Facebook Marketing.