Which is more beneficial for business, SEO or Web 2.0 Internet Marketing?
First, the distinction; SEO is all about making your own web property more visible based on keywords and key phrases a potential consumer may use to find offers, products or services.
On the contrary, web 2.0 is based on the premise of using other websites for positioning or conversion aids by sending visitors to your “money site” or various web properties.
The Pros: SEO instills value and authority to your own online property.
The Cons: Web 2.0 marketing leverages existing traffic inherent within a respective ambient community or authoritative property (but you don’t own the channel).
Even though Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Myspace and others come to mind, the web is local, national and international phenomenon, so there are thousands of sites capable of yielding traffic to your cause.
This type of promotion, typically known as web 2.0 marketing involves using the inherent strength and presence of an online community and its audience and then uses a post, article, video, page or link to pass that traffic along to a preferred destination / landing page.
Depending on if that landing page is a tended property of your own, or if it is being leveraged by you is merely a matter of preference, positioning and market penetration.
A typical web 2.0 campaign looks something like this.
Step 1: Identify the most powerful web properties online.
Tip: Use WWW then look in order of importance
- www AND share
- www AND submit articles
- www AND social bookmark
- Use Alexa or Dmoz as a benchmark:
Alexa.com is a great way to ascertain the validity and popularity of a potential web property. If it has a low Alexa rank (the lower the better) since 1 is the #1 site online measured by the top 1 million websites. This metric can help you gauge traffic or potential levels of engagement.
Step 2: Compile Your List, Create Accounts and Map out your keywords.
- Conduct keyword research.
- Identify lucrative keyword variations based on intent.
- Create your landing pages (infused with those keywords) but geared toward conversion.
- Create collateral materials (videos, articles, guest posts, etc.).
Step 3: Promote Your Content (Create a Viral Buzz).
- Use the top article marketing sites to create the first wave.
- Follow up with Videos across multiple web aggregators (like www.tubemogul.com ).
- Send social media to the videos, posts or articles.
All the while all of the aggregate sources have links back to your main web property or properties funneling traffic into your unique selling proposition and conversion funnels.
These funnels could also be affiliate offers which pass that traffic along to yet another step or node of the conversion funnel.
Web 2.0 Pros: Although we are SEO’s at heart, you could see how a company or individual could rinse and repeat this process in any competitive vertical or for any product or service. And since the ranking factor is already inherent from the web 2.0 properties, even if you do not own a website, you could still profit from proper segmentation.
Keep in mind these types of strategies often push the boundaries of the terms of service for most social media sites and / or web properties “if tactless shameless self promotion does not bother you”…
It also can be rather tedious to implement without automation to some extent (which only pushes the boundaries of moral turpitude, stature and premise.
Who is to say that one’s content is not worth sharing any less than the next persons (since content is subjective), just keep in mind the underlying value of the product, service, offer or promotion and don’t do anything to abuse the agreed upon standards.
SEO provides a far more conducive method for tracking which metrics are required to overcome a particular barrier to entry or threshold; and once you own that traffic, your own web property becomes an asset, vs. relying on the authority of other sites to perform the heavy lifting.
However if you must, I suggest using the most authoritative properties to (a) capture the most competitive keywords in your vertical (such as a viral video leveraged on multiple properties and communities) or (b) use them to provide tangible link flow back to your web properties and conversion funnels.
Articles have links and those links can impact rankings (or even rank on their own in the right authoritative article marketing site). Videos carry significant weight in the SERPS (search engine result pages) and can appear in the top 10 for multiple tags and related queries.
The best strategy is a synthesis of all things internet marketing such as press releases, articles, white papers, free tools, widgets, plugins, themes, blogs, e-books, video and social media engagement. To look past one for another is short-sighted. It boils down to relevance and choice or which yields the most significant selection of opportunity.
I liked this post. I use both for my business and for the business of my clients. What I have found is that a blended approach works best.
Hi Anthony:
I agree…These days you have to diversify your approach.
I was not suggesting to create a blackhat SEO Link Ring, but rather wanted to highlight a few methods and / or web properties for web 2.0 positioning that have the ability to naturally occupy the SERPs.
If your approach is one dimensional, then competition can have its way with you (or you are only engaging one channel).
It’s not always about SEO alone (performing the heavy lifting), positioning (using multiple properties) works equally as well.
Yes, it is best to combine the best from SEO and the best from Web 2.0 to come up with the most effective and efficient web strategy.
Well i don’t know much about internet marketing but what i know is internet marketing is the activity of advertising and selling goods and services online.This type of business is constantly growing in popularity to help millions of people on the internet.
There is no such thing as marketing and conservative, the two do not go hand in hand…
You either lean into it, or your doormat for your competition who is bolder, faster, smarter with allocating their time to produce repeatable ROI…
Thank you for this post!I will definitely come here more often. I have just created my new, personal blog this time and I really enjoy it. It would be great to share our experience!