Digital Asset Optimization: Social Media Meets SEO
Cover three bases with one program: site SEO, digital asset optimization, and social media marketing.
Cover three bases with one program: site SEO, digital asset optimization, and social media marketing.
When people say social media marketing helps you in search, what do they mean? Are we doing all this online socializing to simply get links and boost our page rank? The answer is a clear no. Launching and managing a whole social platform is a lot of effort to simply get links. So why are we really doing social media marketing? We’re doing it to weave our content into the social fabric of the Web and embed our products, brands, and information into places where people gather, converse, and share. We do it to make our content part of the larger body of information residing on the Web, outside the borders of our Web sites. So that’s where search really comes in. By doing this, more of our content pops in search results (text and universal) and promotes our products and services.
Search Results are Information Hub Pages
Google and other search engine results are no longer boring static gateways to other sites. They are our starting point to anything we’re seeking or researching in our personal and professional lives. They are information hub pages that bring together a wide range of links, videos, images, products, social streams, ads, news, and other elements into a single view. In other words, they are the customized on-demand home pages for what we are looking for at any given moment. They are transforming into rich, multimedia experiences that deliver anything we need in the form we want to consume it in. So this is where SEO and social media marketing come together. It’s not all about links – it’s about the distribution of your content and that content appearing in search results.
Digital Assets Optimization and Social Media Marketing
So, while SEO has traditionally been about your site popping in the search engines, social-based digital asset optimization is about getting your content out there, optimizing it for target terms, and having as many mentions and real estate on a results page around a particular topic as you can. Of course, one listing may be from your site, but don’t you want to be the subject of, or at least mentioned in, the content of the other listings? How about blog posts? Are you or your products mentioned? In universal search results, is that your product shot, chart, graphic, or video included and above the fold? How about in image results and video results in Google Images and YouTube? How many of the listings belong to you?
Take Action
Here are a few tips to make sure the content you create is optimized for posting to your site and for social media marketing, like pushing out content via tweets, blog posts, Flickr photo albums, YouTube video posts, blog posts, press releases, and Facebook updates:
Here are seven tips for getting your content out there in a big way:
There’s more, but that covers the big stuff. If done right and done consistently, the lines between SEO and social media marketing will start to blur. You’ll be covering three bases with one program: site SEO, digital asset optimization, and social media marketing.
This column originally appeared in the March 2010 edition of SES Magazine.