The answer is yes. There are two important reasons why SEO is still important in the age of Social Media. These reasons are:
- Findability
- Relevance
Let’s look at Findability first
Let’s say you have set up Social Media accounts in Facebook, Linked In and Twitter. What kind of a plan did you have in place when you set up these accounts? Do you know your audience? Do you know what they are looking for? What keywords are they using to find information in your area of expertise? Are you using these keywords in your Social Media Profiles?
If you answered no or I don’t know to these questions, than you may be missing some opportunities. Search Engine Optimization, no matter where it is performed, in your social media profiles or on your website, help the search engines understand what the page they are spidering is about. The more you can key into your niche the better off you will be.
Next we need to address Relevance
I was reminded of the Wonder Wheel at the SEO and Social Media Meetup last Thursday. One of the meetup members, Brendan reminded us of this tool. Relevance is more and more important to the search engines. Search Engines like Google use concept networks to create the beginnings of artificial intelligence to help connect concepts together which helps with page indexing based on the search query. Take a look at Google’s Wonder Wheel and you’ll see what I mean.
Let’s take a look at the search term “beer”.
You see that several related searches appear. A concept network is being formed. Let’s click on “beer history”.
Once again, Google is showing related searches in its effort to create relevancy. You can use the Wonder Wheel to create new content for you website that Google deems relevant by creating pages based on the keyphrases in the Wonder Wheel. This is important because the more relevant your pages are, the higher up in the rankings you can place.
Of course these factors cannot be considered in isolation. There are over 200 factors considered in the Google algorithm and these are just a couple. Other considerations include on-page optimization and link building. But these topics can be discussed in future posts.
The bottomline is that SEO DOES MATTER for Social Media Marketing so the people that are important to you and your business can find you!
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4 Responses
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Laurel Hamilton Says:
My short answer to “Is SEO still important when social media is the rage?” would be:
You’re not managing social media marketing correctly unless you’re integrating SEO into every step you take in social media.
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cwright Says:
My point exactly! Thank you for weighing in Laurel!
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Jim Hay SEO Says:
Relevance is the essense of SEO. When submitting content of any kind to the search engines relevance is key to gaining the attention of the search engines. When optimizing any content that is off page or on page, in bound links etc. the focus should always be toward your marketed keywords and phrases.
I am surprised to see the wonder wheel being used! Not many people have picked up on it as of yet. I have been using it for several years after the wonder wheel was brought to my attention. As well the wonder wheel brings to light information that can be used when using latent semantic indexing in your content generation.
Terrific blog Colleen!
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cwright Says:
Jim was one of the first people to share the Wonder Wheel with me. It is a very cool tool. Check it out!
