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Social Media and SEO: The Wonder Twins

Written by: Kalena Jordan

Article Overview: Social media marketing and SEO reinforce each other - Why? Because online reputation and search rank monitoring goes hand-in-hand with social media.

Social Media and SEO: The Wonder Twins

In his keynote speech for SMX Sydney, Danny Sullivan mentioned something that really resonated with me. He talked about how he sees social media marketing and SEO as reinforcing each other, like that old cartoon, the Wonder Twins where the brother and sister touched their hands together to create some awesome power to defeat the bad guys.

Yet Danny says that some of the search industry veterans have been complaining loudly about social media. "I don’t wanna be a social media marketer!", they say. "Damn kids! It’s just not SEO."

Yes it's true that if you’ve been doing SEO for years, social media marketing may not come naturally. “But wake up”, Danny says. “Neither did link building! Gonna skip that? No I don't think so. Learn social media or else work with someone who does”. I couldn't agree more.

David Cohn complains that what he hates right now about the Internet is that “Everyone is a social media consultant. Conversation is being comodified - and people think they can become 'experts' in online conversations,” He says.

Well excuse me, but that’s exactly the point! The Internet has morphed yet again, enabling conversations not previously possible to flow globally. Everyone has a voice and they want to be heard, dammit! It’s not a bad thing, it’s called progress and it’s changing the way we think about business.

A similar revolution happened about five years ago when pay per click advertising started becoming popular. Most of the organic optimizers scoffed and said “Nah, our clients don’t need PPC, we can get them enough traffic through SEO. PPC is for amateurs, it’ll never take off”. Well guess what? PPC went mainstream in a HUGE way, quadrupling Internet sales and now there are very few SEO agencies that don’t encourage their clients to run both SEO and PPC campaigns.

When blogging went feral in 2006, all the Web 2.0 naysayers had to eat their hats. I’m predicting the same thing is going to happen to those currently resisting social media. These days, search marketing just can't be viewed in isolation from social media. How can it? They are entwined by their very nature.

Here's an example. Say you are running an SEO campaign for a new client and they need fast backlinks and indexed pages for a brand new site. What's the solution? To me, it's implementing a blog. There's no faster way I know of to acquire links and get your site indexed.

Here's another example. Let's say that one of your clients is having a difficult time in the SERPs. Imagine they have a disgruntled customer who’s created a hate page about them and it's ranking number one in Google. The client has come to you wanting to know if you can use your SEO skills to push the negative page down the SERPs and restore their online reputation. "Sure!" you say.

So what do you do? You write positive blog posts about your client or you hire other bloggers to do the same. You write articles optimized for your client's main keywords and submit them to highly-trafficked sites in your client's industry. You promote them via social media. You make sure the new posts are Dugg, Stumbled, Sphunn etc. You feed a good news press release about your client into the social media vortex and let it take hold.

Once the ugly page has been pushed off the front of the SERPs, you continue to watch the blogosphere closely for any negative comments about your client and make sure they don't rise to the surface again.

This very thing happened to a colleague of mine recently – she is a follower of Sahaja Yoga meditation and had been contacted by one of the site founders to get advice about a slanderous web site they had discovered at the top of the Google SERPs for searches on “Sahaja yoga”. The site in question contained a lot of false allegations about the organization and although it was not their nature to publicly acknowledge or sue the site owner, the founders knew that they needed the help that social media and SEO could provide. They simply decided to optimize their stories and blog posts about meditation and share them with the help of social media sites. Fellow members shared their stories and blog posts about meditation and Furled, Dugg and Stumbled them until the more positive content had gained ground in the SERPs.

Moral of the story? Online reputation and search rank monitoring goes hand-in-hand with social media.

Ok, here’s another example. Let’s say you are an up-and-coming SEO operator with a couple of clients but you need to get more exposure and more business. What’s the best way to develop your reputation? Yep, you guessed it: social media marketing. If your name’s not on Sphinn, Facebook, Stumble-Upon, Twitter or even Digg from time to time, you might as well be operating inside a vacuum. Just take one look at the number of followers the SEM industry rockstars have on Twitter and try to tell me social media marketing is not important.

If your job involves any type of online campaign targeting the under 30 age group, you’d better be haunting the social communities night and day. That’s where your market is and you have to be there too. Even if your brief is to create a traditional SEO channel, you need to get social to understand the market, conduct your keyword research and interact with the target audience.

So how exactly can social media to be considered outside the sphere of SEO? That's right - It can't.

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Article Tags: seo, social media



Related Forum Posts
Re: Kevin needs "social glue" ideas - Hi, I like the idea of "10 items that could act as "social glue" because I am an internet marketer. But I agree with the rest that the 10 recent post is nice. Maybe we should open up a new section in the forums on Social Media...or Social Media Marketing. I will tell you that the world is about 1 1/2 behind when it comes to understanding social media. Building a section now will put EvanCarmichael.com is a great position a year down the road when people realize Social Media can produce more traffic than SEO. Jeff
Re: Kevin needs "social glue" ideas - [quote="WebBizIdeas.com":gvtxsu7g]Hi, I like the idea of "10 items that could act as "social glue" because I am an internet marketer. But I agree with the rest that the 10 recent post is nice. Maybe we should open up a new section in the forums on Social Media...or Social Media Marketing. I will tell you that the world is about 1 1/2 behind when it comes to understanding social media. Building a section now will put EvanCarmichael.com is a great position a year down the road when people realize Social Media can produce more traffic than SEO. Jeff[/quote:gvtxsu7g] Hi Jeff, Thanks for the suggestion. Why don't you start a new post (with a poll) to see if there's enough interest in your idea for a social media section?
Re: UPDATES: New Campaign! New Layout! New Ideas! - GT - thanks for the FYI - I'm not sure if we'll put a link back. Something to consider though! Trent - the new category is "Social Network and Media" which was put in to compliment the Online Businesses category that currently exists. Overall the new categories are: - Looking For, Networking and Events - Review My... - Social Network and Media - Brags and Rants These came as a result of Ringo doing research on other forums and thinking about what could be improved on ours to give a better experience for everyone. I hope you enjoy them! David, I'm looking forward to reading your Brag / Rant!
Re: Marketing 2.0 - What Are Your Thoughts - Hi Shri, Thanks for posting this. I also read it and I believe Social Media is here to stay, until the next best thing comes up. Social media proved to be useful for me many times and I think everyone should use it for their business.
Re: Social Media Marketing Ignorance - [quote="vbn411":7qciluxl]Social Media is space that you have to be in to succeed in our current climate. People are going to be discussing your brand / product whether you like it or not, so you might as well join the conversation and add value. [/quote:7qciluxl] I think that's probably one of the most realistic way to think about it. There's no real textbook way of understanding Social Media, it's the networks of people and their interactions that will exist with or without your input. As for Jennifer, You can always have 2 Facebook pages. Many people do. There is also LinkedIn, which is like a professional networking version of Facebook. The only way to know is to try it.


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