SEO and Social Media Convergence Heats Up in 2012

The convergence of SEO and Social Media is likely to heat up in 2012.  It has been slightly more than a year since Google and Bing publicly started to take into account social media as a ranking signal.  The ultimate goal of the search engines is to find the best answer to a user’s query with the fewest clicks, in the shortest amount of time.  One way that the search engines are doing this is by taking advantage of the extensive user data that Social networks provide.  Evidence of how important this is shown by the recent acquisition by Google of an IBM patent, specifically U.S. Patent 7,865,592: “Using semantic networks to develop a social network.”  SEO specialists have often used patent research to find clues to the Google algorithm.  This particular patent specifically details how a social network could be leveraged to lead users to find “experts” or like-minded enthusiasts on specific topics.  In simple terms, consider that you may want to find someone knowledgeable about real estate in a specific neighborhood to ask for buying advice. But the right person may not list real estate as an “interest,” so you may not be able to easily identify that person in your expanded network (which includes friends of friends). A semantic network would identify the right person to talk to by analyzing which people in your network post content having to do with the specific topic, and how much time others spend reading it.

Although this patent likely has not yet been included in the Google algorithm, it doesn’t mean that we can’t improve our understanding of the relationship between social and SEO.  Here are five tips for better taking advantage of this convergence:

1. Optimize your social media content.  Useful social content (blog, video, images, and audio) that cannot be discovered via search is a missed opportunity to reach an audience that is searching for this content.
2. Take advantage of the link opportunities that social media provide.  It might be as simple as making sure that there are social sharing icons on all of your content or it may involve the actual promotion of your content on various social networks.  Building an SEO programs without leveraging the content distribution and linking benefits of social media makes link building for SEO an uphill battle. Social media encourages participation: sharing, voting, commenting and linking. Popular social content gets exposure, traffic and can result in a substantial number of relevant inbound links.
3. Coordinate efforts between your social media and SEO campaigns.  Even if they are being done by different people, your social media expert should know what keywords you are trying to rank for and your SEO specialist should know what content is being promoted in social media.
4. Use social media to build authority.  The authoritativeness of the source of a piece of content has long been a ranking factor.  Building your profiles on the major social networks can help with this.  In addition, for news and informational sites, it can help to take advantage of the rel=author markup that Google provides to connect all of your content back to the author.
5. Use the data provided by social media to optimize your campaigns.  SEO’s must become comfortable with the measurement tools of Social Media.  You can use tools such as Radian6 to track the user audience and identify keywords, conversations and influencers.  Use this data to build out new content and take advantage of link opportunities.  SEO tools like Conductor are taking into account how many mentions of content there are on the major social media platforms.

Social media will continue being a “hot” activity in 2012, and as our conversations multiply, SEO’s will need to stay ahead of how the search engines understand these conversations and how they include them in the search results.