Last week we mentioned that a primary benefit to car dealers in Social Media Marketing was SEO. The value of this is in realizing that using social media and networking sites to promote your business is not just about engaging with your customer audience, although that is a significant aspect, but also in that when executed effectively, social marketing can also help your dealership website gain authority with search engines.

Authority with search engines is essentially a form of advertising because it causes your website to appear high in natural search listings. This of course is extremely valuable to car dealers which is why making sure this is one of the fruits of your social media marketing efforts is important.

One way to benefit from SEO with social media marketing is to properly link the keywords you reference in your articles and even in the comments you leave on other peoples’ blogs and social profile pages. Search engines scan these web pages for links and repetitive use of keywords so, if you leave 2 or 3 related comments a week on various web sites complimentary to your SEO strategy, then linking them to your site can add tremendous value to your efforts.

While it is ideal to link the exact key phrase of your targeted search market, you still want the reader experience to be natural so sometimes you have to use a variation of the key phrase. But this is o.k. because doing so also helps positively impact your relative or long-tail search marketing.

As a result of the enhanced SEO from which car dealers can benefit in their social media marketing efforts, your dealer website will become increasingly more visible to search audiences across the globe. Every word and every link you place on your site and the websites of others should be considered for its impact on search engines and for its impact on readers.

If you spend all your time writing for your customer audience without considering how search engines will respond then you could be investing a lot of time producing results that pale in comparison to what you could be accomplishing simply by applying a few simple techniques. By the same token, if you write exclusively for search engines then you will have minimal readership, if any at all, which also does not help to enhance your search engine authority and thus awareness online of your brand.

Technorati Tags: automotive marketing, auto marketing, internet marketing, search marketing, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, seo, sem, social marketing, social network marketing, social media marketing, long tail search

This entry was posted on Monday, November 19th, 2007 at 1:53 pm and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.