I had to stop her because their corporate website (huge company, you have heard of them) failed just about every basic SEO item you can think of.  It’s almost comical that in a company this large no one would have bothered suggesting making their site even a hair bit search friendly.  They had to either have been told about their failure and didn’t care or really are that clueless.  Perhaps they’re so big they feel like they don’t need extra visitors from search engines.

From a social perspective, they definitely could be doing much better too (hardly my friend’s fault, she just started helping them) but when they get so much wrong from an SEO standpoint how can they expect to get social and be effective?

The search marketing industry is far more mature than the social media marketing industry – if this company doesn’t bother grasping search, it makes little sense to skip to social.  Search is a core function of the web, and should come first.

The order matters, because search and social programs have an intersection, but to really activate this your core web presence and social content needs to be optimized.  Otherwise, all that effort of directing a community for the outcome of growing search KPIs falls short.  It’s analogous to building a skyscraper but wanting to create the top first without having any sort of base.

Sadly, this example is one that’s all too common.  Somehow SEO, while more mature as a formalized industry, is skipped and companies jump immediately into social programs.  Have you seen this happen too?  What do you think?

Most Companies Still Don’t Get SEO – Yet They Want To Go Social? is from The Future Buzz, a Blog Covering Digital Marketing

Jesse wrote a post titled “Facebook and the new SEO.”  And I feel like it misunderstands both SEO and the motivations of someone searching the web in the first place.  Very similar to how Ben Elowitz misunderstands Google and thinks media somehow needs to be “saved” from search by Facebook.  Let’s dig into it.

Perhaps the group that should be paying most attention though are those that currently pay attention to SEO for their company, or the brands they represent.  With Facebook’s entry into the search space last week, Facebook should now be part of every company’s SEO plan.

The answer to this at the moment is a tentative “maybe.”  It is premature to say that Facebook’s search engine will get used in any degree of scale for searches other than those seeking things directly in the network, such as people or other objects within the social graph.  While Facebook search is growing (as with more users, it naturally would) user behavior of the web is still Google search as the default.  The branding, relevance and sheer quality of Google’s core product is not going to get trampled simply because another popular web product starts hyping their search.  Ask Bing/MSN how well that went — and they also have a 9 figure user base they get to tap (Hotmail has 343 million users globally).

Just last week, Mark Zuckerberg was quite clear when he said, announcing Facebook’s new Open Graph Protocol, that Facebook was working to make “people index the web”.  No longer are the days of complex algorithms, PhDs focusing on the fastest and most relevant search results through code.  What better way to provide relevant content and experience for what people are looking for, and often even when they don’t even know they need it, than through their friends’ activity on Social Networks.  Search is now all about relevancy.

This paragraph just irks me.  It’s just a vision statement of the Facebook CEO echoed by a Facebook fan.  Their PR team must be proud that influencers such as Jesse simply quote talking points that were obviously crafted to position Facebook against Google.  Zuckerberg and his team are consistently masterful at manipulating the media.  As a PR professional myself, I do have to give them kudos for that.

But to explain why this is wrong:  the web’s link graph is already to a good degree people-driven.  The most valuable links on the web are not built by robots, they’re built by humans.  Also, Google already takes social signals into account when ranking content, so this is not a new innovation to Facebook.  Lastly – search is already all about relevancy.  A relevancy driven by an algorithm we as humans have helped shape.  Google improved and iterated on their algo for years to deliver a ridiculously strong product.  It’s not as if Google is blind to everything happening on the web from a social standpoint.

This paragraph is written as if Google search sucks and Facebook is the web’s saving grace from a search standpoint.  I’ll let you pause and think about just how eloquently Google has already solved the problem of web search.  If you think Facebook is going to define a more relevant algorithm simply through a “like relevancy” you’d have to be drinking some serious Facebook Kool-Aid.  Solving web search is not as simple as some of the tech pundits make it out to be.

SEO is something that is now a standard part of any businesses web budget.  It’s simple – you build common strategies for formulating your content to appear properly in Google and others’ search results.  You try to guess the keywords you want your website to appear high under, and adapt the content of your site to make finding it in search engine results much easier.

(Emphasis on “It’s simple” and “You try to guess the keywords” mine – SEOs: the comments are yours!)

I pointed out in the comments on Jesse’s site just how absurd this statement was.  You don’t “try to guess” the keywords you want your website to appear higher under.  If you do, that’s not SEO, that’s flying blindly.  Also, as someone who works on enterprise level SEO projects, I have to laugh at the “it’s simple” statement. My point with this is that Jesse is writing an article about how Facebook is going to usurp Google and SEOs should take notice, and yet doesn’t quite grasp SEO himself.

Facebook has made it clear that this is a search game.  The release of Open Graph Protocol makes this clearer, and you should be paying attention.  Through your likes, Facebook now has the potential to provide near exact matches of advertising towards exactly what you’re looking for, without you even knowing you needed it.  That, my friends, is the holy grail of advertising.

That’s contextual advertising.  And Google is already doing that – as are other web advertising networks.  The thing is, contextual advertising isn’t necessarily as valuable as search advertising because of the lack of intent.  Just because I “like” something or I’m reading content on a page is not necessarily an indicator I’m actually seeking that product out.  Consider how blind we are to most text link ads on most pages that are contextual.  Yet search ads are a different story.

Facebook just did something huge last week.  It is now in the interest of every single company out there to be getting their brand visible in the Facebook search so this can happen.  This is a search game more than it is social.  Facebook just made it a whole heck of a lot more valuable for you to be investing in SEO, but this time it’s on Facebook’s terms, not Google’s, and in the end everyone wins.

Even if this statement was true, I don’t see why “everyone wins” because it’s on Facebook’s terms, not Google’s.  There is absolutely no logic to that statement unless you are more of a fan of Facebook than Google.

If Facebook isn’t currently a part of your company’s SEO strategy it’s time to start re-thinking what SEO means to you and your company.  Like it or not, Facebook is the new SEO.

Rand at SEOmoz for already debunked this statement nicely.  But further, unless users even start to associate Facebook with web search, this statement is flawed without further argument.  Consumers clearly prefer Google, as say the analytics results of any properly optimized website and search stat numbers.  Facebook is definitely a high value referral source and a great outpost for your social strategy, but to say “Facebook is the new SEO” is pure linkbait and nothing more.

Shocker: According To Facebook Talking Points, Facebook Is The Future Of Search is from The Future Buzz, a Blog Covering Digital Marketing

Let’s go through some of the article, as it gets quite a bit wrong:

Facebook is re-introducing serendipity. Top media brands are experts at creating compelling content and experiences. Consumers like to share high-quality content, and the easier that process is, the more that content is passed around and the authors benefit from viral distribution.

“Re-introducing serendipity?”  Does he really mean serendipity?  As in the term defined as:  a propensity for making fortuitous discoveries while looking for something unrelated.  I hope not.  The web itself is serendipity in action from both a content creation and consumption perspective.  Anyone who has ever opened a web browser or published digital content has experienced it.  Serendipity is something the web has enabled since day 1 and is not new or unique to Facebook.

As far as the sharing content bit, it is straightforward to do this now.  I don’t know that Facebook’s like feature changes anything from the standpoint of a media brand having their content shared.  Users have been sharing content since the advent of the web and have been doing so in organized, networked settings for years.  At least users at the top of the participation inequality pyramid.  Whether Facebook will flip the pyramid on it’s head by attempting to make all users social is yet to be seen – it is premature to say this.

While media companies are effective at cross-promotion, such as the lead-ins in TV, many traditional media companies have failed to harness word-of-mouth marketing online to expand their audience. Rather than a TV / Preview guide of available content (Yahoo attempted this for the web in the 1990s until it became unmanageable) consumers will now get a personalized guide to online content, authored by their friends.  Effectively, it’s Tivo Suggestions (based on your viewing behavior + ratings) with the added intelligence of your friends’ preferences. What remains to be seen is how aggressively Facebook will promote the passively recommended content within your news stream.

Don’t we have this already?  My friends are all sharing content right now using a variety of tools, private and public.  Many of them as part of social news communities (both niche specific and horizontal).

Also, just because Facebook will show me what my friends like doesn’t mean their content recommendations will be better than I’m getting from existing social communities.  In fact:  I would choose page 1 of a good social news site over my friends recommendations anyway – no matter how smart they are.  Why? Simple:  diversity, aggregation and incentives must exist for the best content to be found.  Although that’s a question:  does the average user desire the best, most compelling content – or merely what their friends are reading?

And will Facebook make use of aggregate data to share the best content at the category level?  That would be interesting, but it’s not competition for Google, it’s competition for sites like Digg and StumbleUpon (maybe).  I say maybe because those sites are equally about community as they are content.

Content sharing favors well-authored, branded experiences, which contrasts with the Google referral engine which favors “relevance” to a search phrase based on a mathematical algorithm.  In a Google-dominated world, high-quality content can take back seat to keyword-heavy SEO-optimized pages, or simply newer content.

This paragraph is simply not accurate.  Google certainly does look at “well-authored,” high quality publications that have gained authority via social channels when ranking content.  Google’s algorithm takes into account many signals  when ranking content.  For trusted media this is an opportunity, not a threat, to gain additional traffic and exposure (also just FYI – “keyword-heavy SEO-optimized pages” for the sake of being keyword heavy are webspam, not SEO – and also ineffective as the engines know better than to index such content highly).

Media companies can spend more time focusing on creating outstanding experiences, and less time optimizing for Google results.

Optimized content creates an outstanding user experience because it’s simple for that content to be found by interested parties. Search is a core function of the web, and the proliferation of any new social technologies does not invalidate this.  If media want to be found, they should create outstanding content and their writers should be creating appropriately titled pages.  It barely takes any time to optimize content anyway, and media need to evolve to take advantage of the opportunities created by new technology, not hide from it.

Instead of relying solely on proactive recommendations, Facebook is now in a position with automatic login on many sites to passively collect consumption data, and pair that with friends’ behaviors to make suggestions. The better they utilize this data, the more Google needs to watch out, as Facebook can anticipate consumer desires faster than consumers can type “google” into their browsers.

I disagree that Google needs to “watch out” for this reason, at least in the context given.  Google is so valuable because we search with intent – we are consciously seeking something right now – whether it is finding a solution for a problem or seeking out a piece of information for research.  Facebook’s open graph solves a different problem and does not replace the web’s existing link-based graph.

Also it’s not as simple as Ben makes it out to be.  Media companies need digital strategy to succeed, and new features by themselves on any network – powerful or otherwise – do not change this.  In a world where every company is a media company, the game is not the same.  As nice as it would be that Facebook’s social features or other innovations are going to save an entire industry, that is not a plan I would bank on.  Newspapers need to experiment and each find a unique path that works in order to survive in an open information society.

I’ll end with a quote from my friend Mike Masnick at Techdirt.  Ben is not a newspaper guy, but he misunderstands the situation just as they do, so this applies:

Once again, as these newspaper guys struggle to recognize what business they’re in, they seem to reach out and attack Google, without even recognizing what it is they’re attacking. They don’t want to take the time to understand their own business (hint: it’s never been “selling content”), so perhaps it’s not surprising that they don’t bother to understand the business of those they compete against either. And, if anything is causing the industry to falter it’s that simple fact. If they can’t understand the business they’re in (or how others are beating them) then they’re not going to do a very good job fixing themselves, will they?

Think about it:  even if Facebook sends traffic and attention to media their problem is still far from solved as they don’t even know what to do with the current Google traffic (and that traffic is intent-based).  I fail to understand why Facebook traffic – either from a Facebook-powered search, or Facebook likes – change this.

Media Does Not Need To Be “Saved” From Google Search is from The Future Buzz, a Blog Covering Digital Marketing

None of this is surprising.  Social media doesn’t require knowledge of technology or staying on top of  trends and technologies.  Not in the same way SEO does.  In comparison social media is easy to get right.  You just need to know how to market to a connected society, have comprehension in sociology and learn the basics behind some pretty easy to use tools.  Some patience helps too.

The truth, though, is social media is not new hasn’t really changed since I’ve been involved in message board and forum culture of the late 90′s/early 00′s.  There are just more people.  And we’re actually a bit nicer to each other.  But it’s still just digital conversations.  Tools change, but the way we interact digitally hasn’t – despite the glorification of certain platforms over others and the new found ability to be anti-social in public (or for some, more social) with the proliferation of mobile.

So here’s the truth:  digital marketing hasn’t changed as much as some would have you believe.  Search is still the number one source of traffic to my web properties by a pretty good margin (yours too, right?).  Sure I’m getting lots of social traffic, but guess what – search still wins month over month, it’s far more consistent and it’s just better quality traffic.

And this brings us to the point:  despite us early adopters shifting our habits and changing the way we use the web with the release of each new tool because we’re infinitely curious doesn’t mean everyone is like us.  Search is still the core function of those seeking content or information.

If you’re engaged in things like content marketing you should become fluent in SEO before social media.  Social media and SEO work together, but without having a search strategy locked down first, you’ll never fully benefit from the intersection.  Neither happens in a vacuum.

Search engine optimization intertwines with social media and the engines will only continue to look at social signals more in the future as more users participate.  Sites like Twitter won’t disrupt the web’s link graph, eventually it could make it even stronger.  But your marketing, your media, your brand – by engaging social without comprehension of search means you’re yielding a higher conversion channel to competitors.

Social marketing efforts before SEO is putting the cart before the horse.

It’s shocking SEO isn’t yet a core comprehension of all marketers when you consider the power behind the ultimate pull marketing channel.  Yet it’s not, because the truth is it’s work to stay on top of search trends, continuously learn new best practices and relentlessly market your site better than competitors.  It’s also an environment where cash is not king, and many tenured marketers who only understand 1-to-many channels don’t know how to participate in that sort of arena.

Unsustainable traffic

Social marketing efforts behind a website that isn’t optimized will produce fleeting returns.  You’ll hit peaks and valleys this way.  The social web is fickle like that, and users navigating the river of real-time see today’s signal as tomorrow’s noise.  Search on the other hand provides infinite life for your best content.  Good content makes your website and the search engines equally more valuable, everyone wins.

No one looks at page 2

Social web users look at page one of our favorite social sites.  We want what’s new, now.  For many, page 2 of Digg, Reddit or even clicking “more” on Twitter might as well be page 50.  If there’s some thought given to SEO behind your social participation your ideas can be extended beyond real-time and given infinite life by the engines.  If not, when you fall onto “page 2,” you’ll live in archive purgatory.

Your campaigns can and will outrank you

If you engage in social media without having an SEO strategy behind it, it’s possible externalities are going to outrank your own content.  I used to be surprised brands would let this happen, but I’ve seen it happen so often that I’m actually surprised when I see the opposite occur.  It’s just so rare people put thought behind this stuff.

You’re leaving traffic on the table

Good social media participation earns links – the organic, editorial kind.  The kind the engines want to reward you for.  But without an SEO program in place, you won’t fully benefit from those links – which are invaluable.  Most companies aren’t cognizant of the value of links they’re earning or how to make those links work for them, especially many engaged in social media.  And they’re only succeeding in letting competitors crush them.

Quick conclusion…

Be weary of social media marketers who aren’t fluent in SEO – you’ll never benefit from the biggest opportunity the web has to offer.  Search may not be as sexy as social, but it still matters more:  it brings more traffic, higher conversions and is sustainable.

Thinking about this a bit further, this actually goes beyond social media marketing.  I’ll just say it like it is:  if you put any marketing or PR before SEO, you’re putting the cart before the horse.  There is a nexus between these items, but you can’t uncover it until you are organizationally savvy about search.

image credit: zdjeciarnia via Shutterstock

Social Media Before SEO Is Putting The Cart Before The Horse is from The Future Buzz, a Blog Covering Digital Marketing

The link between search and social media only becomes tighter as the engines and the social web innovate and integrate together in ways which make both more valuable.  From the standpoint of staying relevant and at the edge, the engines and the social web need each other.  They are working together for the benefit of users, but site owners can benefit too by creating a strategy embracing the connection.

The web itself has always been social, and search and social have already reached the convergence point.  The future will see an even closer, symbiotic relationship between the two.

Here are 10 reasons supporting the above graphic, that social is your future SEO strategy:

1.  The engines are continuously getting smarter

Make no doubt about it, the search engines are only getting smarter at interpreting links and user data.  It is evolution right before our eyes as their algorithms advance side-by-side with how we use the web.  The engines already know how to treat different kinds of links and will only get smarter at it.  The value of truly earned organic, editorial links will only continue to increase in value.

2.  Those with a strong social strategy get a growing amount of editorially-earned links daily

If your brand isn’t publishing content to the web and involved in building a thriving community of subscribers, you will forever be positioned behind competitors agile enough to do so.  This is because while you can keep trying to build links arithmetically to static content, your competition will be earning those ultra-valuable organic links daily  as their community will be conditioned to anticipate quality and be ready to share.  Their link growth will be both organic and exponential, not arithmetic.  Don’t handicap your brand on the web by throwing up red tape and making it difficult to publish compelling content.  Agility is a factor.

3.  Fresh content = more hooks in the water for search

Simply point, the more content you have on your site, the more you are going to cover the spread of the long tail related to your niche and snag more traffic from the engines.  Also fresh content keeps your site updated, which gives users a reason to come back.  People don’t want to visit static sites, we’re already too used to sites being social.

4.  The engines like frequently updated sites

Feed those indexes with fresh content and get rewarded with frequent visits by the search spiders.  Keep at it long enough and content from your site should get indexed in just a few hours after publishing.

5.  Social web success brings increasing returns

Popular sites, blogs or brands only get more popular, success is self-reinforcing here.  A positive reputation builds upon itself over time and will cause you to receive links and attention at increasing returns if you stick with it and push through the dip.

6.  Social is sustainable

Bearing you nurture your community and function as an honest, valuable contributor, a social strategy is highly sustainable.  You’ll never run out of fresh content and ideas to build your community, web traffic and links if you are truly that interested in the subject matter.  Besides, communities inspire so much, if you build it properly ideas should emerge naturally.

7.  Not only earn links, but digital PR

Links are nice, but it’s not all about links – getting that digital ink and endorsement from influential members of the community is going to help build your digital reputation.

8.  Communities are self-reinforcing

Create a popular community/destination and it will naturally propagate itself over time.  Communities with interested members want to see that community grow and succeed.  People within niches are connected to the rest of that niche, especially on the web – so if you do something worthwhile enough you should, in time, permeate the niche.

9.  The people who find your site through social are the people most likely to link

Yes, only 11% of the web knows to use RSS.  Guess what, that 11% really matters – those are the people savvy enough to share your content in meaningful ways to reach the rest of the web.  People finding you through social efforts are the same people blogging and using social web tools fluently.

10.  Compelling content wins

Notice how the cycle starts with compelling content – without this you have nothing, no other parts of the cycle matter.  The social web as at a larger level will link to the best content naturally, you can’t win against competitors who have this on their side.  And both search and social will only keep getting better at filtering, there is no reason to be boring – unless you want to be ignored.

Quick conclusion:

Search feeds social and social feeds search, there is no mistaking this.  Enable success from both directions to feed the other and your returns will steadily increase over time.

Related posts from The Future Buzz

10 Reasons Why Organizations (And Individuals) With Audiences Win

5 Reasons You Should Learn About Social Media

Ignore The Social Web At Your Own Peril

10 Reasons Why Social Is Your Future SEO Strategy is from The Future Buzz, a Blog Covering Digital Marketing