This Post has been written in response to a comment on this Google plus post +Rand Fishkin of +Moz posed the question : Is It Possible to Have Good SEO Simply by Having Great Content and there were many comments on the post in question. How ever many questions were left un-answered because of the individuals involved specific agendas. see the post and follow the link there for a deeper understanding of the issues discussed here.
First we need to remind those who know, and inform those who have not heard, that #FUFISM is a new marketing term which is an acronym for Functional User Friendly Integrated Social Media which every person who does any form of online marketing needs to understand and put into practice.
Read more about +fufism as discussed in this blog or in our web pages here
Engagement within the social media, in most cases, involves some form of passive link building, as you offer links to your web pages, blog or other online resource, and hope that your target audience and those who have an interest, share your social media posts further, and most of these have links that are useful or offer your target audience specific information relating to your online discussion, or where to find more information on an item that has been requested in the ongoing social media conversation.
Link building is a very delicate affair, and building your social audience is directly linked to your social media policy, especially where your social media policy discusses link building and related issues that need to be avoided such as inadvertently spamming your influencers with requests to share your posts further.
An earlier post discussing link building can be found here
Influencer marketing (new terminology for public relations management activity) is also directly linked to your link building strategies and should be discussed in your social media policy statements which every employee needs to be aware of. This awareness should be done through your own in-house workshops where you ensure that your staff are knowledgeable of your company or organisational social media policies, and what impact their social media activities will have on your total online marketing effort.
If you have more than 5 people working on your online marketing then this is a very critical issue. failure here can and will lead to many issues where your online marketing will have a negative impact on your SERP's through errors that are made by your staff which could easily have been avoided through proper communication. This is where #FUFISM based marketing strategies come into their own, and ensure better co-operation between the various different departments who each play a different role and have a different impact on your toatal marketing strategies.
Things like a junior member of the team, or a new employee making use of a link farm, because he / she thinks that this will help, but is not aware of the impact of this type of marketing.
Other issues are when people within your online marketing use different structures for their NAT issues (NAT= Name Address and Phone Number) A set NAT format that should be used across all platforms, especially within the link building activities on social media, as this is a very sneaky and devious issue, which comes to play with Google Humming Bird and Google pigeon as well as a few other un-named algorithms.
SEO is an aful lot more than doing inpage coding, and involves many off page activities, some of which are even off line, such as adverts in the news paper, adverts on the radio or even television advertising, all of which influence how your target market searches for your info online and which words they type into the search engine.
Are your pages optimized for these specific words used in your offline marketing?
Things like industry specific words which you push out there into the public space (cyberspace) hoping to influence your target markets choice of words when searching online are also part of the SEO industries problems, and link building around these specific sets of terminology are of extreme importance, especially the passive type of link building where these words are used in the social media posts that are put out there with links to pages in your online resources that expand on the conversation around your hash tags and other industry specific terminology.
SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is a vastly complex issue that has three criteria that need to be met
1) your pages must be found within the SERP's (Search Engine Results Pages)
2) Your intended target market must click on your link in the SERP's
3) Those who found your listing in the SERP's and then selected your link there must either click on a CTA (Call Ta Action) within the page or stay on page long enough to satisfy the search engine that they benefited from the information on that page
If any one of these criteria are not met then your SEO has failed. poor link building, especially that of the passive kind, leads to poor conversion rates and has a very big impact on increasing the bounce rate for your pages, as those who have been mislead by your social media posts that have been shared by your influencers, will not stay on page long enough to satisfy a search engine that they have gained any benifit from your content within that specific page. This is where CO or Content Optimisation becomes one of the most critical elements of your SEO efforts.
YES YOU READ RIGHT CONTENT OPTIMISATION (CO) IS A SUB SET OF SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION and any body that tells you different should in my opinion never be trusted with your SEO, or any other part of your online marketing in any way.
Your bounce rate is a very critical issue and all search engines are now looking at ways to use this as a tool to push pages with poor bounce rates lower down the SERP's over time, and lift those which have better bounce rates higher up the SERP's. Google's Humming Bird algo is very active here, and those who do not take this seriously will soon discover that their rankings are slipping and they may not be able to fix this untill they fix their Content Optimisation. Your link building, and especially your link building within the social media plays a very critical role in your Conversion Optimisation (CO) as this leads to an expectation of what the viewer will find when they land on your page, and if their expectations which have been developed within your social media marketing are not met when they land on your page, you will not get any clicks and the end user (your intended target market) will depart in a very short time.
Your bounce rate is a very important #SEOVI (Search Engine Optimisation Value Indicator) that you need to keep under control. This is not an easy task as there are so many factors involved, and your link building through the social media is one of the primary areas that need your attention, as the impact on your CO (Conversion Optimisation) coming from your social media link building activities, both active and passive are extreme in nature.
The CTA's (Call To Action) statements within your online content must match the expectations of your intended target market which you have created within your social media marketing, through your link building and influence marketing tactics, which should all be included within your company social media policies and directives issued to your staff.
It thus follows that what +Rand Fishkin discussed in this WHITE BOARD FRIDAY is very important and you need to watch closely, and listen clearly because he talks around this issue with great care not to offend those who have niche markets such as CO (Content Optimisation) , CM (Content Marketing) SEM (Search Engine Marketers) as well as many others, all of which in my humble opinion are sub sections of Search Engine Optimisation.
