What s an SEO Strategy With Out Social Media?

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1 What s an SEO Strategy With Out Social Media? Search & Social Mark Chard

2 Social Media has become a huge part of our everyday life. We keep in touch with friends and family through Facebook, we express our thoughts on Twitter, and we post funny videos of our Uncle Larry from the family reunion on YouTube. We also blog about things that we are passionate about and we share articles we find interesting on sites like Stumbleupon and Digg. SEO is all about link building and page authority. So wouldn t it make since to say that SEO and social media go hand in hand? After all two major factors in page ranking are authorative links and content, which social media provides. People share links to things they find interesting on almost every form of social media outlets. This in return helps those websites to establish a higher position in the search engine rankings. Plus there is no better way to get new fresh content for your website then by posting or linking to blogs as well as allowing users to submit comments and reviews. It s safe to say that SEO with out Social Media is like macaroni with out cheese; it s just not the same. It can be done, however, you re missing out on plenty of key factors that make it complete. Keys to successful social media Participate on a regular basis Vote and comment often Add friends Put your site in your profile Social media has niches Submit to appropriate niche sites Use social media to get noticed Use social media to help get contextual links Use social media to get market share of links. Lisa Barone 1

3 SEO and Social Media Intertwined A few years back, before social networks were as popular as they are today, search engines such as Google sent spiders out to crawl the Web and they indexed Websites to gather the content that was on them. That content was then ranked using factors like keywords, so when we search a term like Stuffed Bell Peppers, Google would display results in order of importance, and provide links to content it felt best suited for that search query. Since the emergence of Social Networking sites you can type that same search query into Google, Bing, or Yahoo and receive results that have been influenced by the emergence of new social content that search engines now take in to factor when determining SERPs (search engine results page). As Rohn Jay Miller puts it in his article The Fabulous Collision of Search and Social there are three ways social networks are re mixing the way we search the Internet: social content evaluation, social content results, and social network search. More and more the search engines are starting to realize the impact of the social networking sites and they are developing more ways to incorporate them into their SERP. Example the launch of Google Social Search, when searching the web for reviews of a movie you have wanted to see you might get thousands of results and lots of them from big movie companies or well known bloggers. But what if you also want to get results from a friend who has written a review? That s what Google Social Search allows you to do, it provides you with results from people you know and who are like you and share the same thoughts and opinions as you, making the search results more personalized. You can see a video on how it works here. We ve made Social Search more comprehensive by adding notes for links people have shared on Twitter and other sites. In the past, we d show you results people created and linked through their Google profiles. Now, if someone you re connected to has publicly shared a link, we may show that link in your results with a clear annotation (which is visible only to you, and only when you re signed in). For example, if you re looking for a video of President Obama on The Daily Show and your friend Nundu tweeted the video, that result might show up higher in your results and you ll see a note with a picture of Nundu: -Google- 2

4 Not wanting to be left behind in the more personalized realm of social search, Bing has teamed up with Facebook to create Bing Social. What happens is your Facebook friends and their likes factor into your search results. If you search for a restaurant some of the results returned would be ones that your friends have liked on their Facebook pages. The way you can tell which results are which is simple it will let you know, the result would include a statement saying Liked by your Facebook friends. This doesn t just go for restaurants it includes anything that you search blogs, news, movies or whatever else you might search. Here s a short video explaining the main features. (Search results from Bing Social might look like this): 3

5 (Notice your friend s pictures under results that they liked) "Your friends have liked lots of things all over the Web, and now instead of stumbling across a new movie or having to look at a friend's profile to see which restaurants they like, we're bringing everything together in one place." Facebook What Does This All Mean? Since social search is becoming more popular and the major search engines seem to be focusing most of their attention towards ways to improve it, you can bet that it is going to be around for some time to come. As the search engines improve on ways to use social search you better be sure to incorporate social media into your SEO strategy or you will be missing out on tons of traffic and business. Here are a few tips to help you with incorporating social media into your SEO strategy: 1. Since Google uses their Real Time Search Engine to determine the buzz being created on social media site like Twitter, Facebook, Stumbleupon, etc. you are going to want to put your keywords in your title and description. The reason being is that Google hyperlinks your TITLE and USERNAME of the social media site, as you can see in the image below. The two most important tags when it comes to Real Time SEO are the title and description. 4

6 2. Make your title and description interesting and clickable: If you want your clicks to increase you have to have a title that s interesting. Instead of using a title like: Real Time SEO Tips try something more exciting like: 10 Great Tips To Drive Traffic To Your Website Using Social Media. 3. Make sure you put social media icons in easy to spot places on your blog or website. 5

7 4. Ask people who visit your webpage to share your content. 5. Share content yourself: When you see a great article tweet it, Facebook like it, Stumbleupon it, Digg it ect. These are just a few ways you can start right now to build your website buzz and reputation. As you do these strategies Google will start to notice and reward you with a higher ranking. As a side note to help further understand the impact that social media is having search, I did 90% of my research for this paper using Twitter. Written by Mark Chard March 11,

8 References: google social search i.html to google social search.html presence.info/optimization/social media seo optimization collision searchand social launches social search inlabs/ facebook andbing team up for social search marketing conferences/intersection ofsearch and social media/ 7