Social Media and SEO can be a very powerful combination when used together. A lot of companies and individuals usually focus on one or the other, that’s a mistake. SEO is basically the process of “getting found” in search engines. Type my name “Jacob Morgan” into any major search engine and my site comes up first out of around 10,000,000 total search results, that’s SEO. Now read one of the articles and scroll down, see the comments? The links to my twitter/facebook/linkedin pages? That’s Social Media.
Why do you need SEO?
Well quite frankly you need SEO to exist online. You can offer an amazing product or service, but if nobody can find it (or you), then you don’t exist. If someone types your name into Google what comes up? If someone types in a particular service or product that you offer into search engines, (let’s say discount laptops or PR consulting) does your site come up? Now, SEO is actually a lot more technical and complex but as I said, the whole point is to get found online. You have to remember that you aren’t the only one out there who offers marketing services and you’re not the only one who sells laptop parts. There are thousands of other people or companies out there that you are competing with, so you have to make sure that when someone is looking for something that you offer, that they find you.
Why do you need Social Media?
You want to build relationships with your readers and users so that you know what they want and expect from you. Relationships also let you communicate with the people that actually care about you. To use an analogy, if a random person with a megaphone comes up to you and starts yelling at you to buy a new razor would you? Now imagine that a friend of yours tells you about the same razor, who are you more likely to listen to? That is the power of relationships and every company and individual needs to build them…always! Social media is the best relationship building tool there is. Social media also benefits multiple departments such as HR, product development, marketing, advertising/sales, and customer support, not to mention internal communication. Social media is a very robust communication and relationship building platform that everyone should be taking advantage of. Of course, most of the platforms and tools out there are free, but you have to put in the time in order to succeed.
Why do you need SEO and Social Media?
Look at it like this, SEO brings people to your site and social media lets you build the relationships and connections WITH the people that are visiting your site. Think of it as trying to continuously get repeat business. Once you have built relationships with people you can then reach out to them. For example, I have around 900 plus twitter followers (most of who have found me through my blog or an article I have written elsewhere) and when I write a new post those 900 people find out about it instantly, then they can share the post with THEIR followers and so on.
You have to understand that even if you begin using a social media platform such as WordPress, that you will need SEO to make your WordPress site rank. My site is 100% WordPress powered and yes there was a good amount of SEO that was involved in order to get my site to rank #1 for my name.
Sure you can use just SEO or Social Media independently of one another but they deliver greater results when they are used together to form a cohesive strategy.
How have you been incorporating your SEO and Social Media strategies together?
Thanks for reading!
Jacob – Good post as always. Perhaps it's because your last name is Morgan and your girlfriend's name is Sullivan. Great minds think alike. =)
Social media and SEO are not mutually exclusive in my opinion. SEO is important for people to know who you are. It helps when looking for new business or new employment. Companies now go to Google when they want to learn more about a candidate they interview for employment.
Here's an SEO tip – Read and make comments to great blogs like this one. Include your contact information and see your name rise to the top of Google. It probably won't happen overnight, but it will happen if you keep doing it regularly.
Finally, I love your point on Social Media being important in relationship building. People who have friends are much more successful than people who don't.
John P. Kreiss
MorganSullivan, Inc.
Business Solutions in Real Estate and Construction
http://www.morgansullivan.com
Very good post !!
I wanted to share some Visual Presentation on SEO and Social Media created by TELEZENT.
Please check it out and we look forward to your comments.
Optimizing Your Website (Visual Explanation)
http://telezent.com/telezent/Optimizing-your-we…
http://telezent.com/telezent/Telezent_Flash_Pro…
Social Media (Visual Explanation)
http://vizedu.com/2008/10/social-media-explaine…
thanks
Sandeep
Pingback: Using Social Media and SEO Together, Why? | How To Make Money Online Blog
hi sandeep,
thanks for the kind words and for sharing your visualizations. im glad you found the information valuable 🙂
thanks for the comment!
morgan sullivan, can't go wrong with that 🙂
the seo tip only applies in certain cases, the links on this page from disqus are nofollowed and repeating the same link won't help much. in my opinion the best thing to do on blog posts is to not leave a link because people appreciate the content more. leaving links everywhere shows a little bit of a hidden agenda. usually if users find the content valuable they can just click on ur name and be taken right to your site.
i actually discourage people from leaving a lot of links in the comments on this blog because it allows for a focus on content, otherwise it just becomes like a giant advertising and linking site!
you obviously take the time to write well thought out responses which is much appreciated.
thanks for reading and commenting
Jacob,
Nice post. Social media is what my company, Watercooler, does very well as we make TV and sports community apps for Facebook and others. We're just getting started with a couple of corporate blogs to showcase the data and user interaction that we have within our apps. So now I'm struggling with how to use SEO and other means to get people to start reading the blogs. Besides commenting, linkbacks, and other common practices, do you have any other suggestions? Looking forward to your feedback.
Bryan
hey bryan,
i know watercooler 🙂 there are a lot of avenues you can go after, it depends on what your goals/objectives are. seo depends on what you are trying to target and what you are trying to achieve. the team i run starts with site structure and architecture to build a solid seo foundation. the problem is that most people focus on the human experience of seo but they forget that for a machine it's a parsing experience. linkbacks and commenting will only get you so far for an seo strategy. you need to link at your link quality, your competition, your sitemaps/robots.txt file, site, structure, code to text-ratio, etc.
i could go on and on about this. if you guys are looking for technical seo consulting i would be happy to introduce you to my team and perhaps chat on the phone to answer some of your questions.
thanks for reading and commenting bryan!
although i'm still new in SEO field, but i agree with your opinion. thanks for sharing 🙂
although i'm still new in SEO field, but i agree with your opinion. thanks for sharing 🙂