Social Media and SEO

As a search engine marketing company, with many of our clients focused on SEO efforts, we explore the connection between SEO and Social Media on a daily basis. Here’s just a few ways your social media efforts can impact SEO. We’ll look at:

• Links
• Signals
• Search Engine Integration

Links – Having links pointing back to your website from the social media sites can have a positive impact on your overall SEO efforts. Review the links that you currently have on websites like Facebook, Twitter and Digg.com and make sure they include keyword rich anchor text for keywords you are targeting in the search results.

However, even though you may have multiple links on any given website, Google typically views it as one strong link from the domain. A diverse number of domains is the SEO best practice so growing your link profile is essential to SEO efforts and can’t be done through social media alone.

Signals – Even though the content for social media is on third party sites and the links generated count as one link per site, participation in social media is a signal to search engines that you are an active participant on the Internet. While there is no direct correlation between social media and SEO, there are indications that search engines do watch and take note of the social media websites and their participants.

Search Engine Integration – Bing & Facebook, Google & Twitter – The most concrete example we have of the relationship between search engines and social media are the recent partnerships between Google & Twitter and Bing & Facebook.  The Google results will now incorporate live Twitter postings during major news and events. It also has a separate search for Updates which has been added to already existing images, video & news.

Bing is starting to incorporate the profile search and Liked feature into the search results.

Some other pointers on Social Media and SEO efforts include:

• Visibility
• Traffic

Visibility & Non-Branded Traffic -Both social media and SEO work to expand visibility of the website, however SEO focuses more on actively searching users. Your SEO efforts put you in front of users who are already asking for your products. Not only will you want to rank for specific products you offer but also for more general terms to introduce your brand to new customers (also known as non-branded traffic). You social media efforts typically talk to the audience that already knows about you and wants to engage with your business.

Traffic – Social Media & SEO can both generate traffic to your website. As long as the traffic is considered quality traffic and meets your standards for bounce rate and time on site, it is worthwhile to have traffic coming to your website from a diverse profile. This indicates that your website is more visible and will have a better chance of reaching multiple people through social sites and search engines.

In conclusion, don’t be afraid to take the social media plunge. Start with a profile, then interact with your users & promote your company. Finally, refine your profiles and posts for added SEO impact.