Reason 5 for Search and Social Collaboration

By Shannon Johnson, Social Media Specialist at Sitewire.

The equation is pretty simple:

SEO – Social Media Efforts = Missed Opportunities

Same goes when you have it the other way around:

Social Media Efforts – SEO = Missed Opportunities

Here’s why you need both, backed by SEOs and Social Media practitioners who are collaborative and cross trained:

1. Inbound marketing is almost always a high priority for the client.
2. It’s not about the website – it’s about the web presence.
3. You can’t do social media (or “today’s web”) without content.
4. Search engines are becoming more and more social every day.

The need for collective search and social media efforts is even truer and more important now that my fifth and final reason for search and social collaboration is official:

5. Google and Bing both use social signals to determine rankings.

Not long after I wrote about how search engines are becoming more and more social every day, Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, published a post about the actual social signals search engines pay attention to when determining rankings. For some time, it’s been assumed that Google and Bing factor social signals such as likes and retweets into their algorithm, but after Danny’s interviews, there are fewer unanswered questions about what’s true.

Here’s a breakdown of what Danny Sullivan found out by interviewing Google and Bing:

The Takeaways:

Reason 4 for Search and Social Collaboration

By Shannon Johnson, Social Media Specialist at Sitewire.

I really like digital marketing. But I don’t like disunion. Lack of communication. Missed opportunities. Duplicated efforts. Muddled vision of client objectives. You know, those kinds of things.

When we’ve got our heads down trying to finish a partial element of a larger client project, or when internal agency structure doesn’t facilitate cross-team communication, these aforementioned dislikes can be become quite common. So I’ve set out to explain how the evolving relationship between search and social media means we can no longer function in isolation within an agency. Cross-training, refined processes, improved communication, and increased flexibility among SEOs and social media strategists are all extremely important because:

1. Inbound marketing is almost always a high priority for the client.
2. It’s not about the website – it’s about the web presence.
3. You can’t do social media without content. (I really should have subbed “today’s web” for “social media” in this one).

4. Search engines are becoming more and more social every day.

If we take a look at how Google, Yahoo! and Bing have evolved over the recent years, there’s one underlying theme driving most major innovations: enhancing search results with social context.

To illustrate, here’s a non-extensive list that exemplifies how the three main search engines have become more social over time:

Google

• October 21, 2009 – Google partners with Twitter to add tweets to search results
• October 26, 2009 – Google launches Social Search to aggregate relevant content shared from your friend’s social media sites into search results
• December 7, 2009 – Google launches Realtime Search to incorporate live tweets, Yahoo Answers, news articles and blogs, and public Facebook and Myspace updates
• June 8, 2010 – Google launches Caffeine to more quickly index the real-time web
• August 26, 2010 – Google improves Realtime Search, adding the ability to drill down by date, location, and conversation view. Realtime moves to its own subdirectory: http://google.com/realtime" class="linkification-ext">http://google.com/realtime" class="linkification-ext">google.com/realtime

Yahoo!

• June 28, 2005 – Yahoo! launches My Web 2.0 with the ability to bookmark and tag pages and search within a trusted network of saved pages shared by friends
• January 1, 2008 – Yahoo! tests adding Delicious bookmarks data to search results
• October 12, 2010 – Yahoo! enhances Image Search to enable browsing of friends’ Facebook and Flickr photo albums

Bing

• October 21, 2009 – Bing partners with Facebook and Twitter to incorporate status updates into search results
• March 31, 2010 – Bing adds a Foursquare application to overlay check-in and tip data in Bing Maps
• June 9, 2010 – Bing launches http://bing.com/social" class="linkification-ext">http://bing.com/social" class="linkification-ext">bing.com/social to aggregate public status updates from Facebook and Twitter as well as popular shared links from public, non-fan Facebook page updates
• October 13, 2010 – Bing partners with Facebook to add instant personalization to search results, making it easy to find and add friends and view what friends have liked on the web

Search engines use social data to contextualize our search experience in several ways: ...

Reason 3 Social and SEO Need Collaboration

By Shannon Johnson, Social Media Specialist at Sitewire.

As digital marketing technologies become more intertwined, digital agencies need to deisolate internal teams. It’s all too easy for an SEO and social media teams working on the same client to provide contradicting recommendations, or to completely pass up an opportunity to integrate efforts to maximize results if nobody is talking.

I’ve already discussed a couple reasons why SEO and social media cross-team collaboration is vital, especially nowadays:

In August I discussed reason # 1. Inbound marketing is almost always a high priority for the client.

Last month, I wrote about reason # 2. It’s not about the website – it’s about the web presence.

What comes next?

3. You can’t do social media without content.

This month’s post focuses on what fuels social media: content. Content strategy is its very own discipline, yet it couldn’t be a more integral part of social media search engine optimization. Without it, there is little success to be had with either.

Let’s say a client contracted for just a social media strategy. A basic strategy answers, With whom will you engage, where will this engagement happen, and how will you be human?

Based on your recommended tactics, they know they need to start using Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. They feel energized about increasing awareness about their brand, growing their fan base and driving more traffic back to their website.

Yet, when either you or the client goes back to their desk to implement, what is there to publish? What...