Social Media Interaction for the Search Engines 101 - ISSUE 33 - 4/2/12

As everyone knows, the latest craze is in Social Media Interaction, regardless of personal or professional purposes. However, if want to know how to use social media for business, you want to invest your time rather than waste it. By this, I mean that if you are spending a lot of time socializing and providing a wealth of value to your prospects, then why not increase your Search Engine Ranking at the same time?

Unfortunately, there is not a direct way to have your social interactions show up on the search engines. If you do a Google search of your name or your business name, you will not see any of your conversations. The only information that the Google Pagerank system will populate will be the information necessary to find your profile. For example, when we did a search for "Suited Marketing," a link to our Twitter profile populated and read, "Sign up for Twitter to follow Suited Marketing (@SuitedMktgCo). Small Business Development Services - Learn Marketing and Advertising Strategy."

One of the main reasons Google does this is because most social interactions are not value-oriented. Instead, they are simply conversations between people. Google is a huge proponent of high-quality and high-value for their followers and search engine visitors.

If you use Twitter or any other forms of new social media regularly, regardless of whether you have a lot of followers or not, you probably ignore most of what other people are saying. It's human nature for us all to have this underlying urge to feel important. However, if you do have a lot of followers, you also know that you will get overwhelmed with what other people are saying within a few minutes. We currently have over 17,000 Twitter followers and about every 20-30 seconds, we have 20 new Tweets. It's impossible for any human being to keep up with.

On the flip side, Twitter is very similar to Google except that the information is all conversational and it's your burden to shuffle through the mess to find the value. You can type a word or phrase in the search box and instantly find an enormous amount of people talking about that specified topic. If people are interested in what you are looking for, they will be able to find you fairly quickly and may even choose to interact with you.

Now that I've given you a few alternative ideas, I'm going to talk about the indirect way to increase your Search Engine Ranking with the social networks. As we have already discussed in a previous article, blogging is the single-most important behavior for any business owner to be successful in the online world. People are looking for high-value content and information to enrich their lives. If you aren't blogging, then you aren't going to be successful. It's that simple.

Once you start blogging on a regular basis, and assuming you are a good writer, people are going to begin following you because your blog articles WILL show up in the search engines. The way you connect the link between the social networks and the search engines is simple -- you tell your followers about your blog post.

There are two ways to do this. You can either post your blog to each social network you belong to individually or you can link all your social networks together so that you only have to post it once and the systems will automatically do the rest for you. One word of caution about the second option. People absolutely do not respond well to automated posts. The trick behind automation is to make it look like it's not.