Just a couple of years ago such a question would have made little sense.
But today there are over 500 million people on Facebook, over 114 million people using Twitter and over 60 million people using LinkedIn.
That’s a massive audience of people engaged through just three social media sites.
If you ignore social media, and simply continue to optimize each page for the major search engines, you will be failing to engage a very large and attentive audience.
Also keep in mind that many people use Facebook as their primary doorway to the web. They don’t start their day on Yahoo!, CNN or Google. They begin and end their day on Facebook.
So if you don’t reach people through Facebook, or the other major social media sites, you probably won’t reach them at all.
So what makes more sense – to optimize your site pages for the major search engines, or to optimize for social media?
The obvious answer, site-wide, is to do both.
You can’t necessarily optimize a single page for both, but you can decide on whether a particular page is best suited for SEO or for SMO.
When to optimize for the search engines
SEO is still hugely important for most websites. We are right to seek out keywords which have the potential to help our pages appear on page one of the search results. In other words, we want to seek out keywords with a reasonable level of demand, and low supply.
This process may involve creating hundreds or even thousands of pages, each optimized for a particular long-tail keyword or phrase.
These are also likely to be evergreen pages. You don’t optimize a page for the search engines in the hope of receiving a massive spike in traffic from Google within the next 30 minutes. You create these pages in the hope that new visitors will arrive on these page on an ongoing basis…for weeks, months and years to come.
As I have written elsewhere, you also need to be careful that you don’t create hundreds of low-quality pages. If you do, you might fool the search engines into sending you traffic, but you won’t fool your readers. Low-quality pages create a lousy first impression.
Also keep in mind that few of these pages are likely to gain much traction through social media sites. When you optimize for keywords, you are unlikely to create a page which has the qualities that lead to broad distribution through social media.
When to optimize for social media
Optimize for social media when you are writing a page or a post that is interesting, useful, intriguing, provocative or entertaining for people right NOW.
Social media operates like a stream or river, and when people stand on its bank, they never see the same water twice. There’s a constant flow of new content entering the stream.
If people don’t find your tweet within the next 15 minutes, they are unlikely to find it ever.
This is why you need to regularly create pages that people love to share.
You need readers to find and share these pages, so a new group of people can see them, read them and share them again.
(This is also why I post a new content idea daily, 5 days a week, at Web Content Café. Each post gives you inspiration for a new page you can add to the stream.)
These pages are not optimized for the search engines. They are optimized to make people want to share them.
Final thoughts
It would be nice to create a page that is optimized for both the search engines and social media.
This is tough to do, and not something I really try to do. Trying to optimize for both SEO and SMO at the same time usually results in doing neither one particularly well.
What I do, and this is my advice to you, is to decide on whether you are writing for SEO or SMO, and then put all your efforts into one or the other.
How do you choose? As a general tip, I optimize evergreen content for the search engines, and content that is hot right now for social media.
[NOTE: If you enjoyed this article, you’ll doubtless make good use of the daily content ideas I publish for Web Content Café members. Learn more about membership here...]
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