The Importance of Social Media in Search Engine Optimization

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

If there was any question before, last week’s Google announcement that content from your social graph would now be included in your search results is another big proof point that brands need to be thinking about social media as a major contributing factor in their search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.   Over the last few months Google has increasingly handed coveted “first page result” spots to social content.  It started with their real-time integration of Twitter results, and now it’s with the open beta of their social search experiment.

Why is this critical for companies to recognize and incorporate in their SEO? Because your corporate website, no matter how well it’s ranked, is being quickly overshadowed by all of the social content g your brand.  Now results are filled with a slew if blog posts, tweets as they happen, and the links a person’s friend shared about the brand on Facebook.

Don’t worry, though- brands don’t have to be left in the cold.  They do need to start engaging consumers in social spaces, producing content of value, and making their content sharable.  That way the valuable information is getting shared and enforced by advocates and being included by Google in the spaces reserved for the user’s social graph.

This, by the way, is why SEO was on my list of 9 Reasons Why Social Media is important for the bottom line.

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