Using Social Media to Deliver Premium Search Engine Rankings

By Joe Pulizzi | Published: January 17, 2008

Search engine and social media experts know this little fact, but surprisingly most people I talk to, including the majority of web developers and marketers, do not. That is:

The sheer number of available social media sites to promote your content (for a great roundup, Dosh Dosh provides one of the best).
That the success of social media content placement is NOT dependent on the traffic you receive from that social media site when it comes to search engine results.

Basically, I would argue that placing your content on social media sites may have more value for search engine optimization than direct traffic from a social media site.

Let’s prove the point with an example.

I recently posted this article about Seth Godin’s book tour and his take on content marketing. I then placed it on the following social media/social bookmarking sites, using the same format and language for each:

I also used one article marketing strategy, placing the post at Newt Barrett’s ContentMarketingToday site.

The Goal
My interest was to evaluate certain keywords in Google and measure their impact, looking at the blog post itself or the placement strategies.

Success #1
I wanted to start out with an obvious keyword selection, so I used “Seth Godin Content Marketing,” which was in the title of the post. Here are the results after exactly three days:

Overall, dominated the first five results on the page.
Original blog post was first.
Article marketing strategy (Content Marketing Today) was second and third.
Small Business Brief Fourth.
Shoutwire Fifth.

It should be noted that in the Shoutwire example, it received no positive votes, so placement has nothing to do with popularity. Also note that Digg came up on the first page after 1 hour, but within a day was already gone. That said, this strategy may work in Digg’s case for very timely news, but not for more evergreen pieces like I tend to write. (NOTE ADDED: After submitted this post to Digg, it was #1 overall for “premium search engine rankings” after less than 30 minutes. Most likely will be gone tomorrow.)

Success #2
Okay, the first example is hardly ever typed in to Google. So let’s use one that is. How about “Seth Godin Marketing Lessons”? Here are the results:

#5 placement, first page for original blog post.
#3 on second page for Content Marketing Today.
#4 on second page for Shoutwire.
#5 on second page for Small Business Brief.

Results: Not as dominating as the first example, but four within the top 20 results, two of which were social media sites.

Takeaways

Your search engine optimization strategy should integrate the use of social media sites for key pieces of content.
This strategy is even more important for timely news (i.e., Digg example).
All social bookmarking sites are not created equal when it comes to this strategy (where was Mixx, Reddit, Propeller?). We’d need to test this again to see if there was a pattern.
Luckily, the blog itself gets picked up well by Google, but this strategy could really be important for sites that are suffering in the search optimization department. If I had no SEO at all, I would have still had the top 4 of 10 results on the first page of Google.
Titles are key: If you are targeting a particular key phrase, get it in the title…and do it in a string if possible (i.e, Seth Godin Content Marketing).
Don’t mistake this for anything more than another search engine results tactic. Being involved with social media sites as a whole is an important overall marketing strategy. This has nothing to do with the value of being involved in those sites (which is a completely different topic).
Individuals and businesses that create regular content through blogs and articles have an overwhelming advantage over competition that do not.

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Social Content Marketing at Junta42