In today’s cutback economy of slashed budgets impacting marketing capacity, the question of spending priorities becomes acute, writes Daren Bach on Business Scene.

For online business, its not as simple as just choosing to optimise between SEO or social media. Most businesses will just opt for some basic form of SEO. Even when it’s not clear that this is the best method on each website page to attract visitor traffic. The simple fact is that social media is too powerful and pervasive to ignore as an influential online marketing tool.

As we read this, there are over 500m people on Facebook, over 114m people using Twitter and over 60m people at LinkedIn. Simply continuing to optimise each page to encourage Google, Yahoo or Bing is to exclude the human visitor by not directly engaging with a large, prospective audience.

The reason being is that many people use social media channels as their web interface of choice. The daily rituals of social networking exchange predominate online life, far outstripping time spent with search engines.

You reach people through Twitter, Facebook, or the other major social media sites, so the requirement for web design and marketing is to optimise site pages for both the major search engines and social media. However, it’s essential to differentiate between the two applications for appropriate content and messaging destinations.

Of course, SEO is still of immense importance for most websites and the right researched keywords can have potent power to drive search results, especially keywords in moderate demand but low supply. Inevitably, the process will almost certainly involve creating volume content optimised for particular keywords, and niche longtail phrases.

Long-term repeat visitor traffic means optimising for organic PageRankings by creating pages that will be consistently visited and indexed by search engines. The intention is to build a reassuring fixed and credible presence. This means that mostly keywords optimised for long-term goals may not necessarily possess qualities and buzz most suited to of-the-moment social media messaging.

Blog posts, articles and tweets are written content optimised for social media, even though SEO keyword phrases are included for link building. However, the emphasis is on the creation of content so that recipients will hit that Share button or click Re-tweet. Content will only be considered worthwhile sharing if it is genuinely valuable because it is interesting, useful, intriguing, provocative or entertaining.

More importantly, it is intended to be read by people now and therefore needs be frequently replaced and updated with fresh content pages.

Remember – hard as it may be to accept, this type of content is not directed primarily towards the search engines, they are optimised because it concerns the immediate present- to make people want instantly to share them. The exception being fixed content intended for search engine indexing, but which is always subject to sudden change in PageRanking when the algorithm updates.