The blurred line between what is SEO and what isn’t

Just read an interesting post on Ben Wilks’ Blog about SEO and Social Media.

Basically Ben comments on a thread over at WMW which indicates that social media is a waste of time and doesn’t yield a great deal of SEO value.

I both agree and disagree with this.

But before continuing, it’s important to understand what SEO is and what it isn’t.

In previous years SEO was all about doing keyword research, applying a few tweaks to the site and then getting some inbound links and presto, you’d be
ranking at the top.

As the Internet and search engines have evolved, many companies are now starting to use the web more effectively, (many still haven’t, but that’s really a whole nother post) so competing with such sites requires better quality content (and more of it), an intuitive and easy-to-use site navigation, regular updates to keep people coming back and a site that looks reasonably aesthetically pleasing.

Now I’m not saying that you can’t rank well without these things, but it only takes 8 seconds for someone to develop a first impression and if your first impressions aren’t great, then you’re fighting an uphill battle to convert that visitor into a sale.

As a result of this, some SEOs started encouraging clients to improve their site’s design, layout, content etc. because all of this would make for better conversions at
the end of the day. This extended the craft of SEO into online usability, which technically isn’t SEO, but it helps immensely with the whole process.

The same comment can then be applied to marketers who focus on viral material or linkbait. These types of promotions, if done well, can drive substantial traffic and work wonders for (or destroy) a brand, as well as attracting links in the process. Once again, not technically SEO, but also a useful means of gaining traffic with the added bonus of some links. Now, one could then go on to argue about the SEO benefit gained from such links, and I’ll agree that some social media links aren’t particularly helpful in passing link juice (take blog comments, twitter, wikipedia and everything else that utilises the ‘nofollow’ attribute). But the goal for a viral campaign is really more about gaining awareness on a global scale, so it really can’t be measured using the same metrics as conventional old-school SEO.

Which leads me to using social media for business purposes or to help promote a particular site or product. This also isn’t specifically SEO, and can be a huge waste of time if you don’t do it properly. The whole purpose of social media is to share and connect with others – to be social. The challenging part then becomes – how does one be social, while still trying to promote a website?

Blogging is a great way to share and demonstrate your knowledge in a certain area. Take this SEO blog – I try and discuss various SEO related topics that I think people might be interested in and share tips and information that they can help people improve their rankings. By sharing this information, I’m hoping it also shows I have a reasonable knowledge of the industry and if those readers find the SEO process too challenging, they’ll hopefully employ my services to help them out.

The key is to provide information that is interesting and helpful and written with passion. If you can achieve this, there is certainly a benefit to start blogging. The same then applies to other social media tools.

Take Twitter for example – if you only share information like “making a cup of coffee” or “replying to some emails”… it isn’t particularly engaging, nor does it give anyone a reason to follow you. But if you were sharing info about your industry by making comments like “just read this great article about….” or “new legislation for… what does everyone think” etc. You’ve just turned the tool into another platform where you can demonstrate your knowledge while connecting with others who also share a similar interest.

The problem is that most businesses and website owners will do one of three things with social media:

• they’ll create profiles on all the latest social sites and then think “well, that’s social media taken care of… hey, why aren’t I getting any traffic from it?”
• they’ll create a blog/twitter/facebook account but forget that they created it for business purposes and start making posts about the weather or what they had for breakfast that morning… and then wonder why it isn’t helping them with their branding
• they’ll create a blog/twitter/facebook account and spam the crap out of it by pushing their brand and website to anyone and everyone which just pisses people off

So, to sum-up, I think that all forms of online marketing (be it organic SEO, viral, social media, pay-per-click etc. etc.) all has its place and can be beneficial if used properly. Not all of these are technically SEO, but still important when marketing in the ever-changing online world.

Most importantly though, goals need to be set for each marketing method and different metrics need to be applied to measure the performance of each campaign. If you try and track the performance of social media using SEO metrics, you’ll find that it doesn’t yield brilliant results – but that doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile – it simply means that social media is different to old-school organic SEO and subsequently can’t be measured in the same way.