In addition to being a great standalone marketing strategy,
social media
marketing is also widely used in concert with
search engine optimization. One of
the reasons social media marketing has been so widely adopted by those in the SEO industry is because of the dramatic impact that social media
has directly on search engine listings. Here are three ways that social media
impacts those:
1) Getting quality, relevant inbound links
It’s no secret that a successful
social media marketing campaign can result in thousands of new inbound links to
your site. It’s also no secret that inbound links are one of the most important
things that influence the rankings of your site. Put two and two together, and
it’s easy to see how social media can be a great way to improve your rankings.
The best thing about this is that the majority (if not all) of the links that
come from a social media marketing campaign are natural links; they’re not
reciprocated, bought, or solicited
2) Using social media websites for reputation management
Lots of
social media
sites, especially the more popular ones, rank very well within the search
engines. This can be both a positive and negative thing when it comes to
managing your reputation.
On one hand, it is very easy to control the first page
of results by leveraging these sites. Get people talking about your company or
site positively on Digg, MySpace or YouTube, and you might end up with those
almost as "good references," listings that show up on the first page of search
engine results for your name, along with your own site.
On the other hand, if you’re not careful,
it can be very easy for someone to tarnish your brand with social media. Take
Comcast for example; if you look at the first page of results on Google for
comcast, you will notice that there is a
video on YouTube of a Comcast
technician sleeping on a customer’s couch.
3) Ranking pages on social media websites
Do you have a new site that you’re
having trouble ranking? Consider trying to rank a page on a social media site
instead. Like I mentioned above, these sites rank extremely well on the search
engines. Their domains are very powerful and with a few links to an internal
page, it has a great shot of ranking, even for competitive keywords.
So if you’re
launching a brand new site and you know it’s going to be awhile before it ranks,
you might want to consider uploading some videos to YouTube or creating a MySpace profile and building a few good links to it. I’m not saying it’s better
to have these pages rank than your own site, but it’s definitely better than not
having anything ranked.
As you can see, there are a number of situations where social media can affect
your SEO efforts, both positively and negatively. In fact I’m willing to argue
that it’s becoming more of a necessity to learn how to use social media in
concert with SEO. It is also important that you are conscience of the impact
that it can cause to your reputation and you manage that effectively, but that’s
a separate post for another day.
Cameron Olthuis is
director of marketing and design for ACS and
writes regularly on social media issues through the company’s blog,
Pronet Advertising. The
Let’s
Get Social column appears Tuesdays at
Search Engine Land.
Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.