As an SEO professional, I attend a lot of local events that involve SEO, social media, and marketing in general. More often than not, I meet people who consider themselves “SEO experts”, only to find out they run a Facebook and Twitter for their company. In many cases, that’s all they need, but it still isn’t SEO. I once attended an “SEO” event that turned out to be someone saying Facebook is the future of SEO. I walked away shaking my head and trying not to laugh – I don’t want to call someone out in their own presentation, but it disappoints me when a “professional” doesn’t know the difference between SEO and social media. I don’t doubt that Facebook is an important part of internet marketing, but it’s still not SEO. The end goal of SEO is for your website to appear on the first page of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS), while the end goal of social media is to communicate with and find more customers.
What Is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. In a nutshell: SEO is optimizing your website to come up on the first page of Google and other search engines. There are two parts to SEO: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO involves building a “search engine friendly” website, which means having properly constructed URLs, content with the correct keyword density, and content written to not only be helpful to the user, but helpful to the search engines. There are many other on-page SEO tactics as well. Off-page SEO involves backlinking, social bookmarking, submitting to index directories, submitting to search engines, and many other things. I would like to point out that Google does pay attention to things such as Facebook pages, so having a Facebook page for your website is most certainly an important and easy step of SEO, but running a Facebook page does not make someone a Search Engine Optimizer (also abbreviated as SEO).What Is Social Media (And Social Media Marketing/Management)
Social Media and Social Media Marketing/Management (referred to as SMM from here on out) is the act of building up and maintaining a web presence on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, and many others. SMM is a great way to keep in touch with customers and clients. It’s also the easiest and most cost-effective form of “word of mouth advertising” in the sense that a Facebook share or a Twitter retweet exposes your pages to potential customers. To put it simply, you create a Facebook page/Twitter account/etc, get your customers to follow them, and then you post regularly and interact with your followers (customers), and hope that they share what you post with their friends/followers. Of course, it’s not that easy and anyone who manages a successful SMM campaign deserves as much respect as any SEO. While Google and other search engines are known to pay attention to social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, SMM is not SEO and has its own set of strategies for success, and definitely has its own end-goal.Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC)
I didn’t go into PPC, whether for Google, Facebook, or otherwise, because I feel that it fits in its own section of internet marketing with its own details and tactics. Many people argue that it is an integral part of SEO, while others (like myself) feel that it deserves its own category (but is still integral to a marketing campaign).
Hopefully, that clears up any confusion that you may have. I stress that both SEO and SMM are important to a full internet marketing campaign, though in themselves they are very different.
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