Search Engine Optimisation White Paper

Social media can be defined as technologies, practises, resources and communities used online by web users to share thoughts, opinions, texts, images and multimedia content. It is often also associated with search engine optimisation.

Participation, Communication, Community

Dialogue is carried out on mediums known as blogs, social networking portals, book marking sites, press distribution channels and podcasts. In recent years, marketers and web site publishers have begun to look at social media in a search engine optimisation context. The reason for this? As we will see, the challenges and benefits of social media lend themselves extraordinarily well to the goals and objectives often set out by search engine optimisers.

“Social Computing is not a fad. Nor is it something that will pass you or your company by. Gradually, Social Computing will impact almost every role, at every kind of company, in all parts of the world” (Source: Forrester Research).

Fuelled by the development of niche communities located globally but centred in a select number of web sites, social media is one of the fastest growing online applications in the world- around 250 million people belong to one kind of social network or another (source: Marketing Week, 2007).

When you consider that a significant part of traffic (7% in October 2007) to UK retail sites comes from the top 20 social networks – that’s more than from email promotions alone (source: Hitwise UK), leveraging this fundamental shift in online marketing suddenly becomes an intriguing prospect for those reluctant or unable to target traffic and secure brand visibility through paid search alone.

Search Engine Optimisation and Social Media

The way you define your SEO activity and the extent to which you integrate and use social media within it will depend on the rest of your online marketing plan. But, what are the possibilities afforded by social media and what is Social Media’s growing role in the constant struggle to achieve and remain in position one?

Put simply, resources like digg.com, newsvine and reddit are tempting tools for those suffering from low rankings and poor brand profile. There are many ways to add social media to your organic search strategy depending on the results you are looking to achieve. You can

1. Create a blog
2. Createa myspace / facebook page
3. Add bookmarking links to web site content
4. Add a forum or guestbook to your web site and participate in similar forums on third party sites
5. Use press distribution sites
6. Add podcasts to your web site

But, how does all of this contribute to position changes? Good optimisers know that good SEO comes from both on-page optimisation and off page link backs. In fact, social media resources can help you to tick both of these boxes. Of course, not everyone will want to achieve both things. Some feel quite strongly that social media is to be used simply for link baiting purposes. In fact, bookmarking and blogging sites can also be used for brand building purposes, either achieved as part of a separate social media campaign or developed in tandem with link building activity.

So, how is this possible and if you were to adopt the same strategy, would that help with your search engine placements?

Read More: Social Media and Link Building For SEO