Should you use social media to boost SEO

Steve Rubel of Micro Persuations decries this new trend amidst Internet marketers to use social media for the purpose of search engine optimization and Andy Beal reacts to it by calling it hypocritical. I think they are at the extreme ends of both the opinions.

Nobody can doubt that social media is revolutionary. It empowers people to interact and share ideas and thoughts with each other without any interference from the traditional media tools like television and newspapers and magazines and herein lies its quintessential strength and this is the reason why social media is such a hit among the average net users. And this is the reason why the SEO experts and the Internet marketers want to tap into its reach.

Blogging is a prime example of the power of social media. I don’t have much experience with other social media websites but I have plenty of experience creating and managing blogs so I can comfortably talk from this perspective. Is it wrong to use blogging as an SEO tool? Depends on what you call SEO.

The main purpose of SEO is to generate relevant traffic to your website or blog and I see no harm in it especially when you are generating traffic for genuinely useful content or service. For instance if I maintain a blog on content writing and content publishing what is wrong in it if I try to highlight my content in front of those people who want to read my content but don’t know how to find it?

Similarly using your blog mainly to search engine optimize your business website defeats the very purpose of maintaining a blog because the main purpose of maintaining a blog is setting up a communication channel with your readers so that you can exchange ideas and information with them. If, with various SEO tactics you can get tons of traffic but you don’t have anything important to offer, you are simply wasting people’s time and this is where I begin to agree with Steve.