Monday, May 10, 2010

The Integration of SEO, SEM & Social Media

Recently I worked on a few SEO, SEM and Social Media projects providing me with the insight that these initiatives are all interdependent. Some organizations approach these online marketing activities separately and do not take a holistic approach, which will hinder their effectiveness. Brand awareness can be built through social media efforts and a subscriber base can be developed that is prone to share compelling information. Below are several insights for making SEO, SEM and Social Media work together to achieve online marketing success:


The published content that is shared will increase the amount of inbound links to the firm’s site. Search engines incorporate inbound links into their algorithms and earned organic links hold immense value.

Frequently publishing new content on the firm’s website and through social channels will help to drive more traffic from the search engines. People will continue to visit the site in anticipation of the new content and avoiding a static website increases the visits by search spiders leading to frequent indexing by the search engines.

Building a positive reputation through intelligent published content will build on itself over time. This requires the content to be compelling and fresh, which will lead to links and increasing attention.

Sustaining valuable content contributions to the community can eventually earn endorsement from community members with influence and build digital reputation.

Individuals looking for insightful content through social media channels show interest in finding the content and pose better odds of sharing it as well.

Enabling RSS syndication of content blogs on a firm’s website greatly increases the search engine indexing frequency and builds a subscriber base.

Website pages containing frequently published content need to be optimized so that the content can be found in search and drive traffic to the site. The content needs to be developed in a manner that search spiders accept and can index.

Incorporating valuable keywords into the social media content will enable the target audience to locate the content through search.


The relationship between Social Media and SEO/SEM is very strong and will continue to build. The keywords found in published content can help identify the content as being relevant to the social channel members as well as the search engines. SEO/SEM initiatives benefit from the content published for social media by providing targeted traffic to the website through much improved positions in search results pages.  Firms need to develop an online strategy thinking about how these three initiatives play off of eachother.  A great post about developing a roadmap for this strategy can be found on Mashable:  http://mashable.com/2009/04/15/social-media-seo/.


(Diagram courtesy of Sumolabs)

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