Social SEO – A Digital Marriage

@robintemple and @ericellefson lead our sixth webinar about the marriage between SEO and SMM – both strategies are equally important to making sure your website, and ultimately your brand, is visible and relevant to your core customers as they search online. As a site owner, you need to understand how the search engines of tomorrow will rank site content and give engaged sites/consumers the upper hand.

Here’s a brief overview of how build a great foundation to support your digital search strategy:

Make Your Website Relevant: Content is King

On-page Elements (Techie-details)

SEO – Understand that your title tags, headers, image title, bold text and use of keywords are all influential on search engine rankings.
SMO – Coding and tags are not so important, while visual attention grabbers make a bigger impact.

The Meat of Your Page: Rich Content

SEO – Quality content is important in order to rank well.
SMO – Quality content is important in order to hold the readers’ attention and win their approval.

Socialize Your Website: External Content

SEO – Trusted domains will have a positive effect on all pages, including new pages.
SMO – Power profiles on sites like Digg can keep traffic flowing with new submissions.

Relationships with the Right People: Targeting

Know Your Audience

SEO – Provide keyword-rich informational content
SMO – Starting/joining conversations that lead to building relationships.

Research

SEO – Research and Analyze to apply changes that will impact (positive or negative) site rankings.
SMO – Research and Analyze to know what types of content draws interest.

Defining Success:

SEO – Success can be achieved by applying the same practices every time.
SMO – Success lies in knowing the social media audience and engaging in a unique strategy every time.

Measuring Goals

SEO -  In-house URL tracking.
SMO – External content engagement tracking.

Plan Your Attack: Engagement

SEO – Success can be achieved by applying the same practices every time.
SMO – Success lies in knowing the social media audience and engaging in a unique strategy every time.

Integrate and Improve Your Content: Link Building

Be Linkable:

SEO – Inbound links lead to success.
SMO – Links are a result of success.

Capitalize on titles and descriptions by making sure they relate to the content. Doing so increases relevance and increased relevance = your message will spread.

Accept Failure and Try Again

The truth is, even after you’ve followed the rules faithfully, your first dozen (or two) attempts probably won’t work. It takes time to create the momentum you need to establish yourself in the various communities. However, once one of your message does resonate, you’ll understand what all the fuss was about and why social media optimization is worth all the hard work.

You also can’t let up once you get that first taste of success. If you want to maintain the traffic you are receiving, you have to continue to participate. Your success in search engine rankings will wholeheartedly depend on user engagement within social media spaces.