Juice Digital, Making you Digitally Famous

In addition to being a valuable part of a standalone marketing communications strategy, Social Media Marketing is also widely used in concert with search engine optimisation. 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 on search engine listings.

Blogging, for instance, gives you a corporate platform on which you can develop viral/link content which is eminently promotable online. It gives you several additional pages and subjects a month that can be indexed by search engines and allows you to rank well for less common keywords that can still attract a lot of traffic overall (through the long tail effect).

Blog commenting, forum posting and content creation on other sites also helps you increase your brand exposure online and helps leverage traffic from within relevant communities.

With links in mind, it is worthwhile checking that your website SEO is up to scratch in terms of getting links to pages that have some form of decent design structure (titles, metadata, and relevant content) and linking with relevant anchor text.

One of the strongest reasons for SMM’s popularity is that it can bring hundreds of backlinks to a particular content piece. If you are a company that offers something like ‘conservatory building’ or ‘window cleaning’ it can be difficult to think up viral content.

So to resort to creating a piece on ‘The world’s ugliest dogs (and owners)’, even though the backlinks might help, is counter-productive. It would be much better to stay in the home improvement/development niche when thinking about content.

Even after the social media spike in traffic, overall traffic levels to a landing page will increase

Relevant content and advice can help with specific rankings for certain keywords, especially when link/anchor text is the same as the title of the story you are linking to. It’s likely to get more backlinks from the relevant niche.

Google appears to trust social media networks as a source for quality backlinks and appears to transfer link equity, even if most social sites ‘nofollow’ their links.

‘Nofollow’ is an HTML attribute value used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring.

Here are three ways that social media can impact SEO efforts:

1          Getting quality, relevant inbound links

It’s no secret that a successful social media marketing campaign can result in thousands of new backlinks to your site. It’s also well-known that backlinks 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, affiliated or solicited.

2          Using social media websites for reputation management

Many social media sites, especially the more popular ones, rank very well within the search engines. This can be both a positive and negative when it comes to managing your reputation.

On the 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 listings that show up on the first page of natural search engine results for your name, along with your own website.

On the other hand, 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 through pages on social media websites

If you have a new sub-brand site, or page, that will be a challenge to register with search engines quickly, consider trying to create a page on a social media site as well as a brand microsite or website page.

You can upload some videos to YouTube or create a MySpace profile and build a few good links to them. It’s not necessarily better to have these pages ranked than your own website but, in a website’s early days, these links will be powerful tools in its visibility, acceptance and development.

As you can see, there are a number of situations where social media can affect your SEO efforts, both positively and negatively. In fact it’s becoming a necessity to learn how to use social media in concert with SEO. It is also vital that you are conscious of the impact that it can have on your reputation.

But managing your reputation through Social Media Marketing is another story…