Slide-together, by fdecomite

Is SEO dead thanks to Social Media?

No it’s not! There’s no doubt that Social Media Marketing can be used to promote your website and create links – all great for pulling your way up through the SERPs and thus effectively a kind of search engine optimisation (need to learn more? See our new Search Engine Optimisation Course course). But there have been some pretty bold claims going around suggesting Social Media Marketing – or Social Media Optimisation – is the new SEO. What do you think?

We think it can all get a bit muddling, especially when such acronyms as SMO (Social Media Optimisation), SMM (Social Media Marketing), SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) seem to be used interchangeably.

Read on for a summary of the SMO and SEO perspectives, and why we think that SEO is adapting rather than dying…

Half young, half old, but still an apple

Social Media Marketing is not the new SEO

As we discussed on our post about Black Hat v White Hat SEO, some go as far to liken SEO to prostitution or drugs in that it’s a multi-million pound industry that no one likes to talk about. Bearing this in mind, we can expect the industry to defend itself and SEOs to soon squish any suggestion of their impending death!

There’s certainly a lot to SEO, here’s a quick summary: Search engine optimisation is the process of increasing the traffic (or relevance of traffic) to a website from search engines such as Google. This can be done via “natural” or “organic” processes such as editing HTML coding to increase search engine exposure and creating or editing content to include niche long-tail keywords to raise the search engine ranking in less competitive areas and to attract specific traffic that is more likely to convert to a sale. Many SEOs argue that they optimise for the user rather than the web, by targeting specific queries users may enter into the search engine. Though of course any SEO must take into account the way Google and the like index websites and produce search result pages. The dark side of this is Black Hat SEO which could involve spamming, link farming, keyword stuffing and link buying – none of which are illegal, all of which threaten the quality of search results.

One highly effective SEO technique is to create links away from your website (back-links) – this means that the search engine crawlers think you’re important! This is where social media comes in: with Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, Digg, Sphinn etc. it is now incredibly easy to disperse links and content all over the web. There’s an irony underlying this though: using social media (or SMO) for the same effects as SEO, namely increasing traffic to your main website, reinforces the fundamental aim of SEO. So long as we are all still attracting customers back to one main hub, keyword and HTML optimisation for this website is always going to be invaluable. Although this is course something that could change, for example see the popular Shop Tab app on Facebook – allowing fan pages to increase sales by shortening the conversion cycle e.g. Cheryl Cole’s Fan Page.

Social Media Marketing is the new SEO

Check out this Google Trends graph, comparing the popularity of SEO and Social Media as search terms in the UK. SEO, as a far more established process, is still top dog. However, you can see that Social Media has been on a sharp increase since the beginning of 2009 (and before that, Social Networking was still the “in term”), and its popularity in the news is far higher. 2009 was the year that social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook became mainstream business marketing platforms. In 2010 we are seeing people updating their Youtube, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter more than they’re updating their website. The website is increasingly becoming the doorway to these other platforms, linking up with a blog, a Twitter feed etc.

Social Media Marketing is much more accessible for the average business than SEO can seem, mainly because many are using these platforms in their personal lives. Also Social Media is still new, meaning that businesses quick to act stand a better chance of dominating over their competitors than they may by just using SEO to optimise for a popular keyword. By adding customer testimonials and fun How Tos to YouTube, tagging video, blog and image content for all it’s worth, encouraging reviews on sites like Yelp, and by attracting potential customers with useful tweets and blogs, websites can dramatically enhance their customer engagement and sales. This is stuff that they already understand if they understand their business. This is why many suggest Social Media could overtake SEO as their dominant online strategy.

Social Media + SEO = the effective marketing mix

Confused? Wondering why I haven’t really bothered untangling SEOSMOSMMSEM processes? Well these terms are becoming increasingly inextricable.

For example, those trying to rank for a popular keyword will need to create content away from the website and engage in social networks if they wish to succeed. Or, SEOs will need to ensure that blogs have Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Sphinn etc. icons when they’re optimising a website. Or, Facebook marketers should make sure that their content and URL are visible to the search engines. Or, video marketers should make sure they tag their content with relevant keywords.

To conclude, there’s no winner in this – businesses are increasingly going to need to bear in mind social media when SEO-ing, and SEO when social media-ing. How about your experiences, do you agree?

Look out for our blog next week for suggestions on how to use different Social Media platforms for SEO.

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