Integrating Social Media Campaigns with SEO

With the maturation of Google Penguin, some questionable SEO practices will fade away. Some people who used to engage in SEO in the past are wondering how to proceed. 

While some SEO tactics that worked in the past are likely to fail in the next few months, or they have failed already, other techniques will be successful and impervious to changes in Google’s algorithm.  Many analysts are under the impression that SMI, or search marketing integration is an SEO technique that is here to stay. 

Many, already believe that SMI is required to rank on page one of Google for competitive terms.

What Is SMI?

Search Marketing Integration makes use of traditional SEO, but it also uses social media platforms. In the recent past, off-page SEO involved primarily obtaining backlinks. Today, social media is playing a much larger role. This is logical, since social media and SEO both should involve the creation of high quality content, brand establishment, and building trust.

In addition to obtaining backlinks regularly, SMI uses social media platforms, like Google Plus, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and more. 

Search engines now use Facebook likes, Google +1s,  retweets, and other metrics in determining search rankings. Since Google demonstrated that sites with excellent social signals are rewarded, the integration of social signals into your marketing strategy is important, both now, and to an even greater degree as the industry progresses.

Who Should You Follow? 

In the recent past, many individuals tried to skew the system by obtaining large numbers of followers. Many even purchased followers. At this point, search engines are examining who follows you, in addition to who you follow. As Google continues to refine their search algorithm, they will be able to determine who is an authority in a given niche, partly by examining their social media activity and profiles. As Google does this, one follower who is influential will have far more value than unknown followers.

Branding

Social media can be a great means for brand establishment.  Nevertheless, it is often abused by people continually using it to promote products. The days of pushing products and services onto people are over.

This is a fast way to get unfollowed, unliked, and untrusted. If you desire to establish trust and build a brand, you will need to provide people with quality content that interests and engages them.

Good interaction on social media and branding occurs via engagement with your audience. Instead of simply posting links to your latest blog posts, ask thought-provoking and stimulating, questions. Host some interactive webinars, start polls, respond to comments on your blog. Engage in all types of activities that will serve to humanise your brand, making it organic and likeable.

Become An Authority In Your Niche

As content marketing continues to grow increasingly pervasive, thought leadership will become more important.  Being a thought leader is about becoming an authority and having answers to questions that relate to your specific niche. This is really about being very knowledgeable in your niche and assisting others by disseminating this knowledge on social media.

You should research the questions that are important to your potential customers. You might discover these on sites like forums, LinkedIn groups, Yahoo answers and others. After these questions are identified, answer them on social media and your website pages. If you select the proper questions, and give well thought out answers to them, the chances are good that other people will also seek these answers.

It’s also a good idea to get the participation of your customers. If you interview and communicate with your customers, you will be able to discover their issues and concerns and you can then publish content that answers these concerns.

Integrating Social Media And Traditional SEO

Despite the fact than many people have declared that SEO is dead, quality backlinks are still quite influential, when correctly acquired. In the not too distant past automated tools used with spun content of low-quality was used to obtain numerous backlinks. However, those practices are no longer effective and the practice and concept of content marketing has changed the direction of link building.

What if you were able to create one piece of content and get several thousand individuals to read it, and then obtain hundreds of backlinks from it?  If you can become a guest poster on a site that obtains a lot of traffic, you may be able to do this. If you can create a very well researched, thought-provoking and engaging article and post it to a site with thousands of daily visitors, this may be feasible. 

After viewing your content, many individuals are impressed with your content, but they still have no familiarity with the author, which is you. In a few days, you publish additional content on the same site. This content interests and engages readers and makes them want to read even more of your work.

Readers may now recognise your name and they will realise that you are generating a series.  In another couple of days you release a third piece of content. At this point, you have had a chance to build some trust with readers. You are starting to establish yourself as an authority on this topic who is knowledgeable enough to generate a content series on the topic.

If properly executed, guest posting can help you to get powerful backlinks. While receiving one good link from a piece of content can be helpful, a much greater benefit can be obtained by creating a series. If readers view your work on a site with a lot of traffic, you get a lot of opportunity to establish your brand, establish trust, and as a result, bring more traffic to your website.

Google Authorship

As you are generating this inspiring content, don’t neglect to  author all of your content using Google Authorship. When you do this you are notifying Google that you are the creator of this content and you are establishing yourself with Google as an authority in your niche. This will also assist you in building your Author Rank, which will lead to better rankings for all of the content that you create. You will also begin to be recognised as an authority in a specific field.

After you have established Google Authorship, you should also link to your content from other social media platforms, like Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, etc. This provides you with a great method of  quality link promotion and assists you in maintaining your presence on social media platforms.  It’s also important to share the quality work done by others.

How About Your Website?

After adding compelling and engaging content to your site, that others want to share with colleagues and friends, it is vital that you make it easy for them to share the content you have created. If you are a WordPress user, it is quite easy, there are numerous social plugins that will allow you to share your content easily. For non-WP sites, you can simply add the code to your site so that social buttons will be visible on each page.

A lot of authority sites have started to add quotes with tweet buttons in their content. This provides an easy way for people to click on a link as they are viewing your content, and to share it.

Integrating SEO with social media is not difficult. It begins with creating excellent content, and coordinating your content and marketing efforts into a cohesive plan. You need to engage with your audience on social media, and not just push content onto them. Doing this, along with placing easy options for social sharing on your site, will promote a following on social media that will be supportive of your SEO efforts and also be an ambassador for your brand.