Social media and SEO – the perfect partnership

We come across a whole lot of companies trying to develop a lucrative blog for their existing business. A rarer find is a company that has evolved out of a blog, such as Copyblogger. In an interview with socialmediaexaminer, Copyblogger CEO Brian Clark related how combing social media and SEO has been vital to Copyblogger’s success. Here’s a rundown of his key pointers on how to establish a killer blog utilising both:

Do a lot more giving and a lot less selling

A company needs to create unmissable content before it can make any money from blogging. Your audience wants value and information, not more advertising. Many companies with something to sell haven’t tapped into this yet.

Be a person first

This can be particularly tricky for a big company comprised of individuals with different ideas of what the business is about. But ensure you have a unified voice within social media marketing, and most importantly, that you come across as human.

Know what you want to achieve

Even a huge audience won’t create ROI magically. Know exactly what kind of content will attract people to your business before posting anything. Understand what people want, focus on giving it to them and understand you’ll achieve your goals on the back-side of that.

Think of SEO and social media as one process…with two results

You have to attract traffic and links before you can rank well in search engines. Social media is a great way to drive direct traffic, but remember you can also rank for targeted terms with search that will drive even more valuable, focussed traffic.

Social media creates immediate and lucrative benefits, but SEO offers a longer-term, ‘evergreen’, advantage.

Write ‘cornerstone content’

Serve up what your readers most need to know to make use of your website and ultimately to do business with you. Then provide a whole lot of value around that content so people like it and link to it.

Get re-tweeted

The real-time web is king of relevance, and Google needs to be relevant to stay in business. Twitter is a fantastic content redistribution system, and Google is most definitely paying attention. Get your content re-tweeted as much as possible, and pretty soon Google will index you faster.