Are you Tweeting, Yelping and connecting on LinkedIn? Trying to blog at least once a week? Posting on other blogs to get some recognition? Work, work and more work. How will you get it all done? Do you really need to do everything?

Each online marketing activity offers its own benefits and only you know which one is right for your business. Or do you?

Let’s take a look at how content is discovered on the Internet.

NielsenWire authored a blog post (http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/social-media-the-next-great-gateway-for-content-discovery/) that shows the various ways that people discover content online titled: Social Media: The Next Great Gateway for Content Discovery?
They asked Internet uses “When looking for new information online, on what type of website do you start your search?” The answers were:
37% Search Engines
34% Yahoo, AOL, MSN Portals
11% Sites dedicated to specific information (ie: technology reviews at CNET)
9% Wikipedia
5% Blogs
4% Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, etc.

An investment in getting your website to the top of the search results can consistently bring you visitors and it doesn’t have to be on your task list every day. I am not suggesting you drop your activities in social media, but knowing how often it’s used to find new content will help you decide where you want to invest your resources. Just be sure you have your goals defined and your analytics in place so you can measure your return on objectives and spend the time you have producing productive results.

Think of your SEO consultant as an architect and your web development company as a general contractor. A general contractor can build you a beautiful home, but they need to have the perfect plans to work from. A good SEO consultant can put together the plans and requirements for your site and hand them over to your web development team before the build.

SEO is built into your navigation text, file names, graphic names and content. The navigational structure is also a major component of SEO. Unless you work with more than one person, it’s likely they are not an expert in both web development and search techniques because it’s too difficult to stay abreast of the changes in both fields.

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