Social Media, I’d Like to Introduce You to SEO

I used to work at a social media agency that advised companies on how to leverage the power of online conversations happening in the world of social networking/sharing.

I came to the job with experience in SEO, and was surprised to see that SEO had virtually no place in their social media consulting work…. to the extent that writing and other aspects were inadvertently counterproductive to SEO at times.

My coworkers at this company were connected online in so many ways it blew my mind: they have accounts on FriendFeed, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Delicious (to name a few), and they maintain an interoffice wiki and multiple blogs - you name it, they do it in the social media realm. But I never understood the snob factor that came along with belonging to an elite inner circle of the social media-savvy.

Social media snobbery

To the owner of that agency, social media ruled the web world; I sensed that she felt SEO wasn’t as “pure” and “noble” as the democratic and open ways of social sharing.

Sadly, I feel that her clients were missing out on leveraging the power of search engine optimization. If you don’t get found online, who’s going to be talking about you in the social media universe?

I could really relate to blogger Jennifer Laycock’s insightful post, “Why the Social Media World NEEDS to Understand SEO” at Search Engine Guide, where she notes that:

“The true potential for massive reward comes when someone who really understands the value of conversation in social media comes together with someone who understands the technical aspects of search engine optimization. Otherwise, we have campaigns that miss their full potential.”

Laycock uses as a case in point a corporation that scored big points on social media but dropped the ball on SEO:

“Lenovo and Ogilvy have gone to the trouble of recruiting 100 different bloggers from more than two dozen countries to cover the Olympics for them. That’s a lot of link potential… Unfortunately, the site was built without search engine optimization in mind and they won’t be able to reap any of the benefits of all those links that could have pointed their way.”

Blogging alone won’t get you heard

As a social media analyst, the only chance I had to bring my SEO skills to the table was the training material I developed to teach a corporation how to blog: I taught them how to keep keywords in mind when writing their blog titles and showed them some free tools for keyword research.

But it was too little info on SEO - and the site design we did of their group blog was not SEO-compatible and the content not search engine optimized. Link building strategies? None.

Why can’t we be friends?

At the Search Engine Strategies Conference in Toronto last month, I attended the “Social Media Successes” workshop - curious to see how social media experts aligned themselves with search engine strategies. They didn’t, on the whole. Rather, I heard the usual social media gushing about the wonders of conversation and transparency and sharing - and nothing about how social media can pragmatically intersect with SEO and SEM. (The only exception was panelist Stephan Spencer and his social media “hacks” for optimizing one’s profile in various social sites to build links back to your own site, which is a vital piece of SEO.)

So now my goal is to be a workshop panelist at next year’s SES conference to speak about the harmonious relationship possible - and preferable - between SEO and social media. I’ll call it: “Why Can’t We be Friends?” It’s just good business for us to get along.