Social Media Marketing and SEO – Friend or Foe?

With all of the hoopla traversing the interwebs of late you’d think SEO is in danger of being replaced by social media marketing… well, think again. The two work best as a team and can provide tremendous benefit when leveraged correctly.

Search Engines are still vastly dominated by results from typical websites, not Twitter and Facebook status updates. When you search Google, the first page of results are referred to as ‘universal search’ results. This means that heavily weighted (optimized) content from websites, blogs and social networks may be included. The key term here is ‘heavily weighted’.

Search engines like Google employ this tactic because they are aggressively attempting to protect the relevancy of their search engine results. Irrelevant search results undermine the overall integrity of the search engine’s ability to find quality content. Honestly, are you really interested in an affiliate marketer’s tweets about a product they are promoting (for a commission), or would you prefer results that contain listings for actual products?

It is important to note that social content presented within Google universal search results does not usually rank high for a long period of time, like website content. To circumvent this, Google allows users to further refine their results by clicking on the left-column menu to show sortable results from various social sources. In a nutshell, potential visitors have to dig to find most social content, whereas traditional website content is easily accessible.

If a page 1, position 1 listing in Google for a given keyphrase receives approximately 40% of clicks originating from search – imagine how many less clicks content receives that requires ‘diggin’.

This doesn’t mean Social Media Optimization (SMO) isn’t important! It just means that certain principles of SEO need be applied to socially produced content.

Posted by Josh Laughtland, Founder and Consultant for Boise SEO and Internet Marketing Company Jtree.net