Great article by Mick Say over at Online Marketing Academy on a subject close to my heart – social media and it’s effect on organic search engine optimisation.

Social Media in the Digital Marketing Mix

Over to Mick…
“Search engines used to rely heavily on Inbound links to determine the authority of a website. They still matter but social media is quickly becoming a key source of website authority ranking by the search engines.
In February this year Google updated their Search Algorithm, a change they named Panda in order to return better, fresher, newer content to the top of searches. You can read more about Google Panda here.

Why Social Media is Important in the Marketing Mix.

The search engines are businesses which survive and prosper by providing their users with high-quality content resultant from our searches, so they need to ensure that when you and I search for something that they return high quality websites and content to us or we will stop using their service and switch to a better source of information.
Today the search engine algorithms, as well as looking at quality back-links are using links from twitter and Google+ and links from Twitter for example are “Authority-Weighted” by the quality of the twitter users who are sharing the links. So, if a link is tweeted by a person with 20 followers who each have 20 followers then this link will not be considered very important.
However if the same link is shared by a Twitter user who has 10,000.00 followers who each have 5,000.00 followers then the authority of this link will be considered higher and of course as the link is tweeted and re-tweeted by more people in the chain then, it becomes increasingly important to have a large, authoritative social network.

If you are forever chasing business it is because your network is not big enough!
Thomas Power, Ecademy Chairman

Large numbers of friends, followers and fans.

The immediate answer would seem to be to go out and find tens of thousands of friends and followers, and whilst this is true, they need to be meaningfully engaged with subject matter which is important to them, so the business who simply follows for the sake of large numbers will enjoy a poor return on their social media and Digital Marketing investment.”
I love all of this! If you’ve heard me speak on social media, or been at one of my social media presentations, you will know that I am passionate about the benefits that an intelligent and effective social media presence can have for EVERY business. The key is to work on that very thing – an effective & intelligent presence. Just this week we saw for ourselves at Saucy Horse how our presence on the social platforms affects our search engine rankings – in close up technicolor! We blogged on the fabulous #Fenton the dog story ( a lone labrador renegade slipping his leash and causing a deer stampede in Richmond Park).
To cut to the chase (see what I did there??) the site on which this blog featured ranked as number 1 for a different search the next day… for a keyword that is not featured on this site anywhere! This was directly due to activity on Twitter, backlinks from another site and the traffic that we has seen to that blog. When we sat down and worked out the path by which this had happened it was enlightening to say the least. The summary of which is that we have created traffic to our websites solely by talking about things onour social media profiles.
I already knew this to be the case – it’s been happening for a while. It’s always great to see the real benefits I talk about in action though! If you want the full story the pop in for a cup of tea and a cake… but whatever else you do, make sure you have a social media partner on board who can make these powerful marketing tools work for you!