The growth of social media has Internet Marketers wondering if these new areas of interest mean the end of search as the heart of an Internet Marketing campaign. I have always resented the tag SEO for my ideas on the Internet, because the concept of gaming the search engines has been dead for over 5 years now. The growth of link based engines, starting with Google made gaming the engines less useful than a simple coherent strategy. By building content with the user’s needs in mind, you were naturally doing SEO with good links, clear text, and simple content rich sites.
The emergence of social media as new avenues for traffic and links only add more aspects to your traffic strategies. It is no longer “Google or Bust,” when you can generate traffic from Twitter or Facebook.
Good content, useful materials, clean HTML, and publishing your information into social media can all help you gain links to your website, or visitors that may leave comments and enhance your site. Anyone on the Internet for more than 8 years remembers “surfing,” where you would click around from site to site exploring. Pre dot-com, websites linked to each other, Google’s wars on spam may have discouraging linking for a number of years, but with the growth of social media, people are out exploring the Internet, and that helps publishers with good content find more traffic.