Social media, in a nutshell, is a set of new types of online media, which has been creating a lot of confusions among internet marketers in the last couples of years. In fact, there are quite a few characteristics that can be used to identify social media including participation (contributions and comments are generally welcomed), opening (less barriers in terms of making use of content shared), conversation (interactive conversation between broadcasters and users), community (communities are formed rapidly by people who share similar interests) and connectedness (making use of links to other websites, resources and people.)

What are the types of social media?

In present, there are generally six basic types of social media including social networks such as facebook, which allow users to create personal pages and connect with friends, blogs such as wordpress, which allow bloggers to create multimedia journals online, wikis such as Wikipedia, which allow people to add or edit content on their websites, podcasts such as itunes, which allow subscribers to access audio and video files, forums, which allow people to discuss specific topics online, content communities such as flickr, which allow users to organize and share specific types of text or media content, microblogging such as twitter, which allow users to connect in means of mini sized blogging and update content through mobile phone network.

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Avoid Duplicate Content:

We have already learned that Google loves quality content, now lets talk about something it hates: duplicate content. Some people who are new to the world of search engine optimization may be tempted to copy articles, blog posts, or even whole websites and attempt to pass them off as their own; that is theft and Google knows it. Search engines don’t want their listings full of the same content hosted on different websites so the smarter search engines will devalue all but the oldest copy of the content. So it is not simply an ethical matter, stealing content is just plain bad if you’re serious about SEO. There are services such as CopyScape and CopyGator that you can use if you believe that someone may be duplicating your content.

Use Related Keywords:

As I mentioned at the beginning, the use of unrelated keywords anywhere on your page in an attempt to bring in more visitors is never a good idea. Not only can you get penalized for it by the search engines but even if you don’t it will most likely just bring in visitors who are looking for something that you’re not offering. All visitors are not created equal; for example if you are selling coffee makers then a person searching for that is worth many times more than someone searching for pinball machines. It sounds like common sense, right? But you would be surprised at how many people think they can sell ice to Eskimos, so to speak.

Quality Versus Keywords:

Sometimes when we are spending so much time optimizing our websites for search engines, and probably thinking about it way too much, we forget that the valuable visitors of our sites are real people and not robots. Real people want to read real content that makes sense and is not filled with awkwardly placed keywords. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be using keywords in your text, of course you should, it simply means that you need to find the right balance; after all if you are trying to sell something then it is the overall quality of the content that will convert a visitor in to a paying customer, not which keywords or how many times they are used.

The world of SEO is a complicated thing, and everyone has their own opinions, so your best bet is to get started right now; get your website up and running now if it isn’t already and then worry about tweaking it afterward. If you’re lucky then your website will start getting picked up by the search engines within a week, and that is when you can start trying new ideas and SEO strategies. You’re not going to get rich overnight, and you need to have a lot of patience, so don’t even bother attempting all of this if you’re just in it for a fast buck.

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