Many people in the industry still view Social Media and SEO as separate entities, and run campaigns for each independently from one another, or operate them in isolation.

SEO and Social Media have now become intrinsically linked. If you want to achieve maximum success in one, you can’t do it without the other, as the lines between Social Media and SEO are becoming increasingly blurred. Let me explain…

SEO Relevance and Authority

At its core, SEO is primarily concerned with relevance and authority. If you want success in the most competitive SEO niches, your website needs both authority and relevance in the eyes of the search engines to achieve the rankings your company wants. In today’s often confusing digital marketing mix Social Media has become integral to generating both of these aspects for your website.

Link Generation through Social Media

When we refer to having authority in search engines, in essence we are talking about links.

• How many incoming links does your website have?
• What types of links are pointing at it?
• What links does the webpage linking to you have pointing at it?

Social media has become a crucial aspect of generating ‘natural’ links for your SEO campaign. Let’s take a quick look at some practical examples of how social media can generate one of the crucial aspects of success for today’s search engines, links.

Social Media Directory Link Building

At its simplest level, submitting your website to all the available social media websites will generate a relatively small amount of incoming links to your site, in the same way that submitting to a range of low quality free directories would. A worthwhile base link building technique, good for your link profile mix, but there’s nothing earth shattering here, this practice in many ways is similar to free directory submissions (DMOZ, Best of the Web et al).

Link Bait, the Old Fashioned Way

Link bait – the creation of content to appeal to a specific audience to order to generate incoming links, was all the rage when Digg, Reddit, Newsvine etc all burst onto the scene as new social networks. Achieving a front page position on Digg, as well as driving large amounts of (possibly irrelevant) traffic, would also generate a large amount of incoming links to your website. If your content is great, and targeted at the right audience, they will link to it.

Networking and Public Relations to generate links

Through the use of the likes of Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn it’s now possible to use information sharing and networking techniques to build high quality incoming links to your website. If done correctly, these emerging Public Relations processes can yield huge returns in terms of incoming links from high quality and/or relevant websites.

Generating ‘free’ content and gaining customer insights through Social Media

Relevancy comes from text, be it on page or off page. If you want your website to be relevant to your niche then you’re going to need content (text) on your website!

Quite simply the more content your website has, the bigger chance you have for your website to appear in search engine results for a wide variety of long tail terms. Spread that content out across many SEO friendly pages and you’re onto a winner in the Google search results (and your bottom line).

Of course generating content takes time and resource, and this is where Social Media can come into play. Putting the effort into initially building a following or community around your site can wield massive long term gains in terms of generating free content, increased SEO traffic and more conversions.

Blog comment forms, ‘Ask The Expert’ platforms, forum discussion boards, story submissions, and social platforms are all great ways for your visitors to generate this keyword rich content for you, and for you to get a unique insight into what customers think about your brand and products.

Fail to participate and offer your visitors the ability to interact with your website and your brand means you’re failing to maximise the potential of your websites traffic, your brands exposure and your bottom line.

Social Media signals as a ranking factor

For a long time links have been the most important ranking factor for search engines, and they still are today. However there is a widely held belief in the SEO community that social media signals will become an important part of how Google ranks websites.

This train of thought is logical, search marketers understand how the current link algorithm works, and they know how to game it. One way the search engines can combat this threat is by introducing social media as a ranking factor, to maintain the quality of their search engine results.

Why not use the indicators of a good website left by the web as a whole participating on social networks rather than just those (relative) few who own and run websites?

If you want to future proof your website against these likely future changes, then the time to engage in Social Media is today. Be proactive rather than reactive, otherwise in a few years you may find the top rankings you hold today have disappeared and you’ll be left playing catch-up with your competitors.

Personally, I view Google as a mirror of the environment in which it operates. It uses the variables available in that environment to produce the best search results for its customers. This environment, the landscape of the web, has changed dramatically since the inception of the search engine. At its core, the Google algorithm is still very much a Web 1.0 search engine, operating in a Web 2.0 environment.

I would also argue that in many ways Google always was a social search engine. What are links if not a machine readable indication of the relationship between two human parties? For me this ‘social measure’ playing a part in ranking websites will only continue to grow.

Raising brand awareness through Social Media

Achieving a front a page Digg story, having a popular Facebook app, spreading your widget across the web, driving traffic via Stumble upon, appearing in many Google search results across many terms are all going to push your brand out, increase the amount of people searching for your company online (and hopefully your products offline too) and visiting your site from a link on a Social Media site. Ultimately this increase in traffic and exposure will affect your bottom line.

Social Media can’t work without SEO

How do people find your blog? How do people find the comments left on your blog? How will people discover all that fantastic content created in your forum? Through the search engines of course! Without a search engine friendly website you’re not maximising the potential of the content being created on your domain through your Social Media platform.

If you’re spreading your brands name fair and wide via Social Media it is crucial that you have a SEO campaign to back it up when people remember aspects of that campaign and subsequently search for them in Google.

Having multiple Social Media accounts is also a fantastic way to help with brand protection, fill up that first page of Google SEO search results with profiles you’ve created and control; and push that negative publicity out of the spot light.

SEO and Social Media – bed fellows for life

SEO needs Social Media, and Social Media needs SEO. In today’s digital marketing environment one cannot operate successfully, to its full extent, without the other.

So if you haven’t begun to think about it before, now is the time to integrate both your SEO and Social Media strategies to ensure you’re maximising the potential of your website and your sales, future proofing yourself today.