I was reading a blog article today on ‘SEO – the Third Pillar of Social Media’ and whilst it all made good sense and the organisation concerned had carried out considerable research I couldn’t help but think that this is the wrong way of thinking about it. Search Engine Optimisation is not really Social Media because, to my way of thinking, the definition of SM is that the content is user generated and SEO is how a website is engineered so that it can be found by searchers on any particular search engine whether it be Bing, Google, Yahoo or whatever.

Social Media tools can be used to great effect to help to raise the profile within a community and this can be translated into higher page rankings.Links to Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin to mention but 3 will help by hopefully having the content shared among the community to which the website/blog/article/post is directed. Engaging with your community and encouraging individuals to share your information with their wider networks allows the message to spread in a much more sophisticated manner than in the early days of keyword spamming.
Of course, the basic requirements for good SEO still apply.

These are:

• Sound, relevant copy,
• good keywords within the body copy and paragraph headers
• good semantic layout
• links both internally and externally

WordPress is especially powerful at linking new posts and or pages to the wider world via plugins that will links to Twitter and other SM platforms. This property is one of the main reasons why we now recommend to our clients that their website be based on WordPress.

In our next article we will expand on SEO, Social Media and its impact on Social Search.