Illustration: Sandra Kuan

Working integrated search and social media strategies
Modern search engine optimization (SEO) first took notice of social media when it realized that it was the perfect tool for backlinking. With hundreds of platforms for creating free links, it sounded like a paradise for SEO professionals.

Search engines reacted with the “nofollow” tag, which indicates that a particular link shouldn’t be trusted. With social media becoming mainstream, and various platforms being used to communicate and share knowledge (via blogs, social networks, forums, social news websites), these links became increasingly more valuable in search rankings. This presumably marked the beginning of integrating content strategies into social media and search engines.

An integrated content strategy
At its foundation, search engine and social media strategies have the same objectives: to gain the attention of the user and put in place a relevant content strategy. Integrating content strategies into social media and search engines creates a synergy between these two areas. At the end of the day it’s about knowing what interests the users (based on search results) and where they are socializing.

For example, you can use your most relevant keywords and its behaviour over time to adequate the content in social media channels. At the same time, you can see which content generates the best response in social media and optimize your SEO content based on that.

Social search is a trending topic
It seems that recent search engine updates are reinforcing this idea that social signals are being taken into account in search engines. It seems reasonable to use social signals in order to determine the quality of content. Imagine an article with thousands of links, none of which were shared on Twitter. How much credibility would you give this content?

Google seems to have noticed the problem, the company is losing the social battle and it is trying to fight back with its latest update: the Google +1 button. The link graph, in which Google’s algorithm is based upon to determine best quality content, seems broken and completely manipulated. On the contrary, the collective intelligence behind any social network seems like an ideal tool to determine interesting and quality content. In this instance, we wouldn’t be talking about SEO and social media as different areas, but rather one in the same.

It seems an integrated content strategy for SEO and social media is already in play. But, what is still to come?

Read more from José Llinares on his blog, Marketing Digital – Estrategia Online.

Tags: +1, SEO, Trending

0 comments