Google Confirms Social Media Effects Your SEO

[DJ]

This is a great read for anyone that is interested in understanding the impact of social media on your SEO. It definitely has an impact just as many of us in the industry have been saying for a while!

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-bing- ... luence-seo

[Brett]

Thanks for the link! It's great to hear a bit about the social integration into search engines.

From a strategic point of view it's interesting to consider the potential of link and like building through web PR releases. PR releases have always been great for getting backlinks from authoritative sites, and now with the weight of social media linking and social graphs, it should become a key part of an Internet marketing strategy.

If you consider the types of websites that distribute PR releases, they're typically news related sites. Not only that, these sites are trusted, they're pushed to Google News. So now not only do you have brand exposure (and possibly a decent click through rate depending on niche and content, PR layout, etc.) to hundreds of thousands of readers, but you have the bonus of being socially injected into the social graph of each news site. You better believe those links and relationships will be shared and distributed across all available channels. For perspective, many releases are distributed to a network of over 100k+ websites.

The vast majority of news related sites have a social media marketing strategy, pushing their news content to various social sites. This is how they promote their brand and the quality of their content - exactly what you're aiming to do with a PR release. One thing to consider is the authoritative quality of these social media/networking based news accounts. This is an extreme example, but how many retweets or likes will @cnnbrk get out of their 3.6 million Twitter followers? How many will shorten the URL and pass it on to friends on various other social networks?

You now have the opportunity to buy a "Sponsored Article" on various news related blogs, some that hit 30+ million page views a month. There are news blogs for just about every niche and getting involved now is more important than ever before. Not only is it important to promote yourself cross platform (Foursquare to Twitter to Facebook), but it's now important to leverage the social graphs of others and get yourself involved!

[DJ]

This is a fascinating response Brett, and certainly something that companies like TechWyse should be testing out and reporting results on.