By Mikaela Krenzen

Director of Flint Interactive, Jen Strickler, pointed to search and social media among the hot topics of 2009 during our recent agency recap. She was absolutely right. Not only have they both evolved immensely over the past few years, but they have become more and more reliant on each other. Search + Social Media

There are huge benefits to incorporating search engine optimization (SEO) and social media together. Here are just a few:

Gain Ownership of Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)
Have you ever wondered how one company can dominate the first page on Google? Well, if you haven’t noticed, blogs and social media sites index separately from website listings. By utilizing WordPress, YouTube, Twitter and FlickR in addition to your website, you could potentially secure the first five slots for a search query. Creating accounts in each site is the easy part. If you intend to succeed, then you’ll need to optimize the content with keywords and phrases in each location and update it on a regular basis.

Drive New Traffic to Your Website
Well-optimized social media content can bring new visitors to your website. Therefore, you’ll want to make sure that your website is optimized with relevant, dynamic content. This will help engage these visitors and encourage them to come back. When users come back often, site ranking is likely to improve because the traffic acts as a trigger to register the site with search engines as a valid, popular website.

Build Your Link Profile
Including social media links on your website will improve your external link count (links to another site from your own). Including a link to your website on various social media sites will build your inbound links (links to your site from another). And, ensuring that the anchor text you use includes important keywords and phrases will add even more value to your links. Creating a solid, respected link profile for your website is likely to increase your site ranking in the SERPs.

Success in social media depends on SEO, and search engine rankings rely largely on social media. Don’t expect these topics to fizzle any time in the near future. If search engine rankings are a top priority for you, then you must be ready to embrace them both.


Mikaela is a search engine specialist and digital communications trends watchdog for AadlandFlint and The Flint Group.