Online marketing experts are preparing for the next big trend in the world of internet marketing: social SEO. This technique harnesses the power of social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter to connect your business to many customers - much more than could be reached through traditional channels, or even standard SEO.

Search engines are now collecting information from social networks in their efforts to provide users with relevant and useful information. Social search engine optimization holds particular promise for businesses that seek to better understand complex consumer reactions to your business’ marketing campaigns. In addition to drawing information from your social media presence to help your business website rank higher, social SEO also improves the visibility of your social media pages to help you engage existing and prospective customers more effectively.

In social SEO, it is important to keep in mind that your community of business partners - which includes not only your end customers but also your suppliers and vendors - play a very important role. Each of these entities can help drive more traffic to your website and social media pages, and this synergy can be harnessed to build a great deal of momentum. This provides you with an effective medium for both marketing and sharing, offering an opportunity to refine a creative and powerful long-term SEO strategy.

To ready your campaigns and strategies for the arrival of social SEO, it is important that you define your objectives in clear and specific terms. Combining the SEO-powered reach of your social media presence with properly refined and targeted content that can be easily shared and distributed, you can expand your visibility and reach far beyond what current best practices are able to offer.

Here are four key benefits of social SEO campaigns:

• More referral-driven traffic: Social search engine optimization creates enhanced opportunities to draw in traffic organically, which is an increasingly important way of improving rankings.
• Expanded access to consumers: More and more consumers are launching searches for products and services through social media outlets. One of the key benefits of socialized SEO is its ability to improve your visibility across multiple channels.
• Advantage over your competitors: The more diversified your online marketing assets are, the better positioned you will be to beat your competitors to the punch.
• Effective reputation and brand management: These new SEO practices offer additional ways of counteracting negative commentary and customer feedback.

Social SEO is very powerful, but it is difficult to master. The professional resources available at Social Strategy1 and its network of partner sites will help you learn everything you need to know to start working on your small business’ Social SEO. And if you need some extra help, Social Strategy1 will be there to support your ongoing efforts to take advantage of today’s dynamic online marketing landscape.