Social eCommerce

Chapter 12. Social Search Engine Optimization

So far we’ve concentrated on direct sales and customer interaction through social media. While social networks may be taking over the Internet at a rapid pace, traditional ecommerce websites are still where most online sales hapåpen. In fact, most etailers who are successful with social media are using it to eventually direct customers and prospects to a landing page on a corporate site or online store, so even if the method of getting there is new, the traditional website is still the focuså of ecommerce.

Traditional search engine optimization (SEO) may involve a number of different factors, from code changes and URL redirects on the server to getting people to link to your sites from places where search engines look. Hopefully, you already have a good SEO process in place. (If not, we recommend The Art of SEO [O’Reilly], which was coauthored by one of this book’s coauthors, and is widely recognized as the definitive work on the subject.) Adding social media to your existing SEO strategy is both easy and inexpensive.

Beyond driving traffic to your site, you also want to be found in social network search engines. Google is pretty good about finding your publicly accessible social media profiles and pages, but what about the search engines that are built into the social networks? That’s a whole different, and quickly advancing, kind of SEO.

Note

There are a lot of technical terms in this chapter. If you need clear definitions, you can find ...