Search and Social Media Working Together for Your Business

People ask us all the time about two “buzz worthy” items these days…Search Engine Optimization and Social Media. Well, what most don’t realize is that the two are completely and utterly connected to each other. Now, most folks understand that search engines are driven by high-powered, mathematical algorithms, which are able to judge content based on the words (copy) on your website. What these massive ranking formulas cannot understand is just HOW valuable the information on the website is. (They can count the words but they really don’t know how valued any one word is over another in a societal context) Bing! (on goes the light bulb)… This is where social media/marketing comes in. These search engines now have a partner! Not only can they determine the content of your site, but based off of searches and comments on social media websites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, etc. they are able to determine the value of that content (who’s posting/talking about a particular topic and how many times in “real world,” person-to-person exchanges.). The combination of traditional search metrics when combined with the input from social media is extremely potent. So, the bottom line is, if you’re trying to optimize your rankings and drive more people to your website you won’t be able to do so (effectively) without some sort of social media strategy.