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Social Media and SEO: The Wonder Twins
By Kalena Jordan (c) 2008

In his keynote speech for SMX Sydney (http://www.ask-kalena.com/
events/smx-sydney-danny-sullivan-keynote/), Danny Sullivan
mentioned something that really resonated with me. He talked
about how he sees social media marketing and SEO as reinforcing
each other, like that old cartoon, the Wonder Twins
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonder_Twins) where the brother
and sister touched their hands together to create some awesome
power to defeat the bad guys.

Yet Danny says that some of the search industry veterans have
been complaining loudly about social media. "I don't wanna be a
social media marketer!", they say. "Damn kids! It's just not
SEO."

Yes it's true that if you've been doing SEO for years, social
media marketing may not come naturally. "But wake up", Danny
says. "Neither did link building! Gonna skip that? No I don't
think so. Learn social media or else work with someone who
does". I couldn't agree more.

David Cohn complains that what he hates right now about the
Internet is that "Everyone is a social media consultant.
Conversation is being comodified - and people think they can
become 'experts' in online conversations," He says.

Well excuse me, but that's exactly the point! The Internet has
morphed yet again, enabling conversations not previously
possible to flow globally. Everyone has a voice and they want to
be heard, dammit! It's not a bad thing, it's called progress and
it's changing the way we think about business.

A similar revolution happened about five years ago when pay per
click advertising started becoming popular. Most of the organic
optimizers scoffed and said "Nah, our clients don't need PPC, we
can get them enough traffic through SEO. PPC is for amateurs,
it'll never take off". Well guess what? PPC went mainstream in a
HUGE way, quadrupling Internet sales and now there are very few
SEO agencies that don't encourage their clients to run both SEO
and PPC campaigns.

When blogging went feral in 2006, all the Web 2.0 naysayers had
to eat their hats. I'm predicting the same thing is going to
happen to those currently resisting social media. These days,
search marketing just can't be viewed in isolation from social
media. How can it? They are entwined by their very nature.

Here's an example. Say you are running an SEO campaign for a
new client and they need fast backlinks and indexed pages for a
brand new site. What's the solution? To me, it's implementing
a blog. There's no faster way I know of to acquire links and
get your site indexed.

Here's another example. Let's say that one of your clients is
having a difficult time in the SERPs. Imagine they have a
disgruntled customer who's created a hate page about them and
it's ranking number one in Google. The client has come to you
wanting to know if you can use your SEO skills to push the
negative page down the SERPs and restore their online
reputation. "Sure!" you say.

So what do you do? You write positive blog posts about your
client or you hire other bloggers to do the same. You write
articles optimized for your client's main keywords and submit
them to highly-trafficked sites in your client's industry. You
promote them via social media. You make sure the new posts are
Dugg, Stumbled, Sphinn etc. You feed a good news press release
about your client into the social media vortex and let it take
hold.

Once the ugly page has been pushed off the front of the SERPs,
you continue to watch the blogosphere closely for any negative
comments about your client and make sure they don't rise to the
surface again.

This very thing happened to a colleague of mine recently – she
is a follower of Sahaja Yoga (http://www.sahajayoga.org/)
meditation and had been contacted by one of the site founders
to get advice about a slanderous web site they had discovered at
the top of the Google SERPs for searches on "Sahaja yoga". The
site in question contained a lot of false allegations about the
organization and although it was not their nature to publicly
acknowledge or sue the site owner, the founders knew that they
needed the help that social media and SEO could provide. They
simply decided to optimize their stories and blog posts about
meditation and share them with the help of social media sites.
Fellow members shared their stories and blog posts about
meditation and Furled, Dugg and Stumbled them until the more
positive content had gained ground in the SERPs.

Moral of the story? Online reputation and search rank monitoring
goes hand-in-hand with social media.

Ok, here's another example. Let's say you are an up-and-coming
SEO operator with a couple of clients but you need to get more
exposure and more business. What's the best way to develop your
reputation? Yep, you guessed it: social media marketing. If your
name's not on Sphinn, Facebook, Stumble-Upon, Twitter or even
Digg from time to time, you might as well be operating inside a
vacuum. Just take one look at the number of followers the SEM
industry rockstars have on Twitter and try to tell me social
media marketing is not important.

If your job involves any type of online campaign targeting the
under 30 age group, you'd better be haunting the social
communities night and day. That's where your market is and you
have to be there too. Even if your brief is to create a
traditional SEO channel, you need to get social to understand
the market, conduct your keyword research and interact with the
target audience.

So how exactly can social media be considered outside the
sphere of SEO? That's right - It can't.
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Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine
optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and
respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as
running a daily Search Engine Advice Column
(http://www.searchenginecollege.com/blog.htm), Kalena manages
Search Engine College (http://www.searchenginecollege.com/) - an
online training institution offering instructor-led short
courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine
Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.
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