The valuable relationship between SEO and SMM

Something which I am currently thinking about is the relationship between Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing. There surely is a direct relationship, and this short post about SEO and Social Media Marketing mentions it, too:

When it comes to social media, millions of links are shared every day on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and blogs.  As more people share a link to a website, the ranking of the webpage will increase.  So the more your links are shared via social media, the more search engines pick up on this and increase your website’s overall rank.

But it doesn’t only work in one direction – it also works the other way around:

It’s also important to note SEO’s impact on social media.  Primarily, if a link is easier to find on a search engine, then people are more likely to share it.

So far, SMM and SEO experts don’t seem to be working together much. Social Media Marketers might think about a presence on Youtube, or conducting a „blogger outreach“ programm, some crowdsouring, etc.

But when selecting platforms or target audiences, Social Media Marketers tend to only think about „social value“ of the respective platform or person. This Social Value is determined by the potential influence of that platform or person on the opinion or actions of other users.

The SEO tends to only think in „Link Value“ of a platform. When doing offsite optimization, SEOs try to place links on other sites that have a high link value in the „eyes“ of Google, so that it helps to improve the ranking of the SEOs site.

So SEOs don’t necessarily care about the Social Value of a site, and SMMs don’t care about the Link Value of a site.

Quite often this might correlate, since the Google Algorithm is based on social dynamics (sofar, most links are still published by human beings), but not always. And as far as I know, SEOs and SMMs don’t yet plan their activities together, trying to increase the intersection between the two online marketing approaches. It could prove to be interesting to unite these two approaches the next time activities are planned!

Nice idea for an ordinary product: Inside Google

Coming up for an original idea for a rather ordinary product like the cereal wheetabix isn’t always easy.

In this case, it’s a play on the fact that wheetabix as a breakfast gives you energy for the whole day. So they came up with a questions that is interesting for all of us: „What makes the worlds largest search engine work?“

Googleinside

The answer: a library lady who assembles all the information within 0.12 seconds (or so), you can take a peak behind the Google screen over here.

When you’re not typing search queries yourself, it seems like you can see queries of other people as live search. But somehow I don’t believe that…

Social Media Counter showing the growing Social Web

A guy named gary has produced a widget which demonstrates in „real time“ the explosion of the social web. As you can see below, the rate of new content and interaction on the various social sites and applications is enormous! He writes about it:

I quickly built and coded the app based on data culled from a range of social media sources & sites at the end of Sept 2009.

On his site you can see more about his data sources, and you can also grab the source code for the widget.


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Links & News, 09.11.08

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1 trillion unique webpages and information overload

Just a quick note: While read/writeweb writes about information overload and how it has caused a productivity loss of $650 billion, Google boasts about having indexed 1 trillion (1,000,000,000,000) Websites. Add Email, twitter, SMS and possibly even paper producst like books and newspapers, the amount of information available – or battling for our attention – is enormous these days.

Tools for searching (or: finding), aggregation, filtering and blocking will become ever more important.

Vote for marketing memes on the web

I should have known. The chances of having an idea first are really slim. So someone, Alister, to be precise, came up with the idea to block the URL for Marketing Meme first. A URL that could be the meme-tracker of the marketing world, just as techmeme is the meme-tracker of the technology world.

Not sure when he came up with this, of course, it doesn’t say on the site. All it says is: your vote and support is needed here. And the post behind that link was written in December of last year (so I am probably only 5 months too late – which is a decade in internet terms). Now he is asking us from the marketing community to help him to get the guys from techmeme to setup a special service for the marketing industry:

I’d be happy to see some nice ongoing volume of inbound links from SEM Search, but honestly, I’d really like to see Gabe Rivera over at techmeme.com create a “marketingmeme.com“, that removes SEM/SEO/SMO/PR/etc stuff out of techmeme and puts it under its own “engine”, building off, say, Lee Odden’s list, with some fuzzy logic around that, finding other on-topic blogs as well.

So if you’re interested in having such a service (I am, for sure!), go over to this site and put your vote in the comments!