The Ocean Agency

Search engine optimization is extremely important for your business as 95% of all site traffic from search engines comes from page one results (icrossing).

While the importance of being on page one for your business has not changed, social media has shaken up how you get there. As social networking has increased, search engines are forced to pay attention to tweets, (public) facebook updates, forum discussions, Youtube videos etc. The list goes on.

Via

In Today’s web, Social media matters to the search engines,  which makes optimizing your businesses’ social media presence a top priority. Recently, Brian Solis wrote a fascinating article about optimizing your social media presence in order to improve your search engine positioning.

25% of search results, for the world’s top 20 brands link to user generated content (Socialnomics July, 2009).  This number is bound to get higher as social network interaction increases.

Facebook has just surpassed Google as the number one traffic driver on the web.

From these statistics it would be easy to paint a portrait of a world where Facebook could eat the entire web, and SERP is completely determined by social content. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves — Posting items about your business to Facebook and Twitter everyday is not enough to rank well on search engines, or communicate your message to your target audience.

Good content that encourages interaction and sharing is now more important that ever to your search engine ranking position.  Spending time crafting resourceful content that is engaging and shareable, combined with patience, hard work, and clean coding will get you to the top of the search engines.

Curating content, both your own, and content that offers value to your target audience syndicated expertly on social media channels is a necessary addition to any SEO campaign.

How is your business or SEO company integrating social media  to improve your search enginge rankings?

Much of the promise of social media marketing lies in the ability for your business to go “viral”. However, unlike an actual virus, which spreads no matter what, people actually have to choose to share content to make it spread.

Before you make you business promotion, advertising, or messaging go “viral” you first need to understand why people share online content.

To elaborate on this chart, let’s work with an example:

Let’s say that you own a dive bar and have created a humorous 15 second video that promotes your bar. At the end of the video there is a coupon “password” that will get people a free pitcher of beer on a Monday night. Beyond questions like “is the video entertaining” or ” is the coupon effective” you need dig a little deeper and get at the motivations for online sharing.

Where are people going to share this information?  How will sharing impact their percieved value among their digital networks? To make matters more complicated, everyone utilizes their online networks differently, and shares accordingly.

When you share a piece of content it means something. We all know that “sharing is caring”, but with online content sharing is usually more about caring about yourself and your image than anything else.

So next time you’re looking to make a branded piece of media and you want people to share it, make something that will make the sharers look and feel cool, intelligent, and in the know. Don’t worry, you don’t have to come up with it all on your own, The Ocean Agency can help you out.

For more great discussions of “viral” campaigns check out these other posts from The Lost Jacket, and  Big Spaceship.