You may or may not have heard about Google Wave, but some of you may have received an invite to review the new product, launched at the beginning of October.
For the benefit of everyone, Google Wave is another new platform for collaboration. What is more interesting is that it blends the massive search power of Google with the collaborative functionality of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.
Why is Google Wave significant? Well it simplifies search and social media as well as reinforcing the relationship between SEO and social media.
Social media know-how
As marketers we need to be social media savvy, and not just in terms of understanding what social media is and the tools available. We also need a deeper knowledge of how to manipulate social media in support of other areas of digital marketing, such as search engine optimisation, in order to extract more value from social media investment.
Search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Bing are the tools that are frequently used by your customers when researching products, services and brands. More often than not it is the comments, posts, reviews and recommendations that are ranking highly within the search engines which are all social media conversations. Therefore you need to regard SEO and social media as inextricably linked and essential to the representation of your business within the digital world.
Positioning your brand highly within top search engines such as Google is challenging, however there are ways that social media marketing can assist in this positioning. The following information should give you food for thought on how to achieve this the right way.
SEO and social media working together
Marketers must look to treat SEO and social media as one. When looking at blog posts, comments and campaigns, anything you place within social media must be optimised in order to increase the discovery of the content organically within search engines.
Content on your own corporate website should be optimised in order to be shared by readers or bookmarked within social platforms. This again will add to the organic links generated by users at no cost and will add to the search engine positioning of your content.
For example, you can look to optimise product content to be re-tweeted so that you are automatically generating links that can be shared amongst Twitter and other social platforms that may in turn be picked up and blogged about. This will add an extra link, boosting your SEO for that particular product page further.
Furthermore, in order to increase the search and social potential of your company, why not look to develop a social media press room whereby any news, white papers and case studies are search engine optimised and social media optimised for distribution amongst Twitter, LinkedIn and SlideShare? This will make your content visible on as many platforms that are appropriate for your target audience. Don’t forget that case studies and white papers can also be bookmarked within sites such as Delicious, Digg and Reddit, increasing your brand exposure and reach.
Generating traffic to your site
Taking this further you should look at optimising your content to be distributed amongst social media outposts and seed this social content into communities and forums at the initial planning stage. This will help deliver targeted traffic back to your launch pad or target destination. As a result it will further improve your chances of being ranked highly within search engines.
When thinking about content remember it’s the creativity within it that will generate organic links as people will want to share the social currency amongst their networks. Creative content will generate conversations that in turn will create links and word-of-mouth activity, this will increase the organic search engine positioning of your products or services.
All the above can assist in digital reputation management for your brand. Correctly optimised content on message blog posts can work to push negative posts or comments further down the rankings and move more positive comments up.
By introducing a combined approach of SEO and social media you will stretch your content and budgets further while creating a wealth of business opportunities through non-paid for search activity.
