Denver Social Media: Social Media’s Role in Your Search Engine Placement

Mike Hanbery - 3.24.2011 8:00 AM

On Friday, March 18, 2011, Denver's premier Social Media for Business Meetup group explored exactly what social media can do and should not be counted upon to do for your company's search engine optimization rank and Internet presence. Here are the highlights:

The Goal of Every Search Engine: Provide the most relevant search results possible!  That’s all.

Key Factors Determining Your Search Engine Placement

• Site Saturation – The number of indexed pages at your Website
• Inbound Links & Relevancy – The number of “good” links to your Website
• Website URLs – Your main URL and the URLs of all the pages within your Website
• Website Page Titles – The Title Tags on each page of your Website
• Website Page Header Tags – H1, H2, H3 tags on each page of your Website
• Website Page Body Content – use of relevant keywords, themes and hyperlinks
• Website Interlinking Strategies – Relevancy and structure of the links within your site
• Website Crawlability – XML Site Maps, HTML Site Maps, Robots.txt
• Physical Address & Local References – Consistency, reviews, etc.

How Can Social Media Help?
Site Saturation
To provide regular, consistent, on-brand content for social media marketing, you must create the content. If you first publish this content to your Website (in a blog for example), you can dramatically increase your overall Site Saturation. 3 blog posts a week = 156 pages of content a year.

Inbound Links & Relevancy
Using social media to tell people about the great content published at your Website will increase your number of inbound links. Do this for relevant audiences, become a recognized thought leader and you will score better on search. Allow your content to be viral, via tools like ShareThis.

Website URLs
By making sure your Website content has URLs with keywords properly formatted in them, you will score much higher. Also, make sure all your posts, status updates, Tweets, etc., are employing these best practices. You will greatly increase your visibility.

Website Page Titles, Header Tags, Body Content, Interlinking & Crawlability
Use relevant keywords within your social media content!

Physical Address & Local References
Google has merged local search with organic for many categories. Better to have an address in the city in which you want to show up on search (e.g. Denver). References help promote your Website higher and higher in these results. Dex, Yelp, Yahoo, etc… Always be consistent and check your listings.

The event was videotaped and is available virtually in its entirety on YouTube:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
  
• Part 4

We hope you'll join us for our next event on April 15, where we'll update how video fits in your social media marketing strategy.

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