part four: b2b social media channels and tactics
SEO & social
“SEO is a marketing function for sure, but it needs to be baked into a product, not slapped on like icing after the cake is baked.” Duane Forrester
Author and conference speaker
Search engines have long relied heavily on external links as a proxy for quality. The assumption is that if a website site is good it will naturally attract lots of inbound links from other websites and blogs, and therefore that site should rank highly in search. However, as the internet evolves, social marketing mentions and “likes” are becoming increasingly common, and search engines realize that they need to look at those social marketing signals, in addition to normal links, to judge what ought to be ranking highly. So, by having plenty of buzz about your site in popular social marketing like Facebook and Twitter, you could receive a direct SEO boost.
That said, as of 2012 the direct impact of social signals is estimated to be relatively minor compared to links, according to SEOmoz’s survey of industry experts. This relatively small direct impact is expected to increase in the future, so for wise marketers looking to future-proof their SEO strategies, social marketing is probably a good investment.
Infusing SEO keywords into blog posts and social marketing properties Part of SEO is being mindful of the keywords your target audience is searching for, and then using those keywords within all properties you want to rank well in search engines. For an easy and free way of doing keyword research, check out the Google Keyword Tool.
As a side note, many social marketing sites, particularly in profiles, will allow you to insert links back to your website. While this may seem like an easy way to build links, unfortunately most “nofollow” those links, which is a piece of invisible code that essentially tells Google, “Don’t count this link as a vote.” That’s not to say you can’t get some good traffic through those profiles, or that other search engines besides Google won’t follow them, but it probably means you won’t get a direct link boost in Google’s eyes.
After you identify target keywords, don’t go crazy. “Keyword stuffing” is a bad idea and went on Google’s chopping block a long time ago. You want to use keywords in a way that reads naturally to humans. With that caveat in mind, titles, descriptions and headlines are particularly important, as well as including keywords at least a few times in text blocks. By having keywords infused into your social marketing properties, you can use them as additional pieces of bait in the SEO ocean.
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