Social SEO & Channels of Distribution

Comments | Posted by Lee Odden on Oct 5th, 2009 in Blogging, Online Marketing, SEO, Social Media

blog marketing

At several conferences I’ve used the image above to illustrate how a blog can be the centerpiece to a social SEO effort where objectives are focused on raising brand awareness and improving customer relationships in a way that is beneficial to search engine visibility.

I see several key opportunities with a unified SEO and Social Media strategy:

1. Social media involvement produces content. Content that is optimized and linked to, does well in search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Therefore, optimized social content and the digital assets that are common to social media (images, video, audio and widgets) are all optimization opportunities. Better search engine visibility means more traffic to social media content from customers that are looking for it.

2. Of the top 20 search engines according to comScore qSearch in August 2009, 3 are search functions within social media web sites. YouTube is the second most popular search engine after Google. MySpace and Facebook are also in the top 20. In fact, Facebook’s percentage of increase from July to August was more than double any other search engine in the top 20.

The increasing popularity of search within social networks presents optimization and analytics opportunities. Marketers need to realize search doesn’t just happen on Google, Yahoo and Bing. Twitter is many things, including social network, messaging platform and search engine.

3. While great content is instrumental for great performance within organic search results, publishing in a vacuum is naive. Creating distribution channels for great content can drive awareness, traffic and inbound links. Optimized content with a quantity of quality incoming links results in superior search visibility.

Social networks and media sites that have social networking functionality offer prime opportunities to interact with communities of interest and can be particularly effective as distribution channels.

If there were ever a legitimate way to automate link building, it would be the RSS disribution and syndication functionality to promote new content to people who are interested. Those same people are often publishers in the form of blogging, reviews, comments and new features like Google SideWiki with the ability to link out to what they’re interested in.

The diagram above illustrates this situation well, where a blog is the central repository of content and social media sites around it are the developed networks of communities and channels of distribution for quality, keyword optimized content.

What other opportunities do you see with Social SEO?

I’ll be presenting on this topic today at 9:45 during the MIMA Summit, Salon C. If you’re attending the sold out event, I hope to see you there. If not, check out the live video stream on the MIMA Summit web site. We’ll also be liveblogging the event here, so watch for more posts later this morning and afternoon.

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Tags:Blog Marketing, social SEO

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ccurtis

This was an informative post. I had never really though of the blog as the center of SEO and SMM. This is a great theory and I will have to try it!

Thank you!

durbs15227

In terms of distribution and visibility, content needs to reach a critical mass. What this level is varies for all enterprises. Marketing effort do tend to overlap sometimes, i.e. the Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn crowd. The big G tends to devalue anything they don't own, go figure, hence Youtube ranking #2. Pittsburgh Internet Marketing firms such as Blackball Online Marketing use these channels fairly well. We are seeing Social Media hit a critical mass of its own. It is a wonderful time to be in this business. Thanks for a great post.

rifkijones

This is a great article, and the visual really helps to put the whole concept of promoting through social media in perspective.

Rifki

Gabe Chesman

I think a blog is a solid distribution channel due to its user-generated content thus creating user-generated distribution.

mk4467

Its cool.Thanks for your info
http://www.areapal.com/

jfkolkata

as always... excellent post Lee!
Thanks for such a useful information for my website's like http://www.jewelfortune.com . I was unaware about the advantages of the Search engine optimization...............Keep posting!

bigSteve

Thanks for these very helpful information... Keep posting!

Oxzen Media

This is also seemed to be an informative and helpful to us.

Thanks.

Ry

Using excessive social media channels can lead up to echos. Like fore example, if your blog post, auto-posts to twitter and friendfeed, and your friendfeed in turn auto-posts to twitter and facebook.

IMHO moderated use of automatic settings from social websites are advisable.

Norene

Lee,
I really liked your graphic! I often don't think of Youtube as a search engine. I really need to use that medium more! -Norene

nancy14386

Thanks for such a useful information. I was unaware about the advantages of the Search engine optimization.

Eric Melchor

Love the visual diagram! Didn't realize Youtube was that popular a search engine.
Eric

smseonext

Thanks! This was an informative article. It’s important to take the TIME to build quality links on an ongoing and frequent basis; and it will take TIME (like you said) for this work to show results. Good relation between Coke and blogging.

Melissa

Very well said Lee. Thanks for these very helpful information... Keep posting!:)

Julien G

Really nice post. But, have you some dates to show us ?
The way we communicate and exchange on the Web has clearly evolved, but when ?

Andrew | Personal PPC Coach

It's kind of mind blowing the speed at which things are changing and progressing. Social media is the new media of choice. We can't get enough of it!

RBeale

Excellent post and image to illustrate your point. It is clear that as each day passes, people are spending more time in social media networks (youtube, facebook, twitter) and thus using those sites to search for content.

Maggie

This blog highlights a great point: content distribution needs to occur on multiple platforms. So many companies fail to see the value in this. When our company develops a new blog post or begins promoting a new campaign for a client, we try to promote it on at least 5 networks (Traditional Engines, Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Digg, etc) this method of cross-promotion has really helped us to ensure that our message is readily available when people are looking--I definitely recommend it for any agency's social media/search strategy.

scarpet1

I had never thought or realized that the search engine at Youtube was that heavily used. It is the second most heavily used on my computer also.

Ahmad Barirani

I couldn't agree more when you say that social media can be good for raising brand awareness. I think that social media offers the possibility of looking for what is hot. Used in parallel with SEO can give great results.