New Boston Creative Group

by Chris Ostrom on October 30, 2009

Clients are obsessed with social media. If I had a dollar for every time clients asked about how they can be hip and build social media into their websites, I’d have enough venture capital to fund my great new app that will light up an iPhone like a Zippo lighter at concerts. (What? You mean “there’s an app for that” already? NOOO!)

At any rate, people love social media, and that’s cool. But for most small business owners, to focus on it first is to put the proverbial cart before the horse. While sites such as Facebook and Twitter and YouTube can play a huge role in your overall web business strategy, they really should be seen for what they are — pawns in a larger gambit of search engine optimization or SEO.

SEO is simply a set of good practices for making your website as attractive as possible to search engines (and here’s the kicker) without having to resort to paid advertising. Okay, that’s the upside. The downside is that SEO can be tedious and boring and time-consuming, which is why it so often gets neglected. You build good SEO by engaging in such mundane activities as identifying the keywords your audience will most likely use to search for you and sprinkling them into your concise and well-written web copy…beating the bushes to find other websites to “backlink” to you…making sure your web developer builds standards-compliant pages for your site…using a content management system to handle behind-the-scenes SEO tasks, such as building meta tags, page titles and sitemaps on the fly. The list goes on.

Boring. Boring. Boring. And if you’re not careful, overwhelming. But SEO is still important. That’s why you must pick your battles. Start with basics first and build from there — which brings me back to the frenzy over social media.

Don’t get me wrong. Facebook pages and Twitter feeds may very well work for you as part of a larger search engine optimization strategy. Developing a die-hard Facebook following can create exposure for your site and business, which can increase links and traffic to your site, which search engines in turn notice and fawn over, which compels them to rank your site higher in queries, which leads to yet more traffic and more exposure. A beautifully vicious circle. All of this feeds the SEO zeitgeist that makes your site more popular than your competition and, hopefully, your business more profitable.

But social media isn’t for everyone. If you produce industrial ball bearings or three-in-one oil or gauze pads, you’re not likely to generate a whole lot of buzz with a Facebook fan page (except maybe from Fletch aficionados) or with an All-Time-Great-Ball-Bearing-Bloopers video on YouTube. Other SEO strategies may offer a better bang for the buck.

So, you’re probably wondering, where do I begin with this SEO thing, and how do I prioritize? Good questions. And ones I hope to help you with in due time on this blog. Once you get past my bloviating, I think you’ll find my advice worthwhile. Boring as it is, SEO is sort of my thing.