Big Change is here -Ranking Through social networks

A few months ago your twitter and facebook marketing had little or nothing to do with search engine rankings. Many of us began to see changes in this but only this month did Google come out and admit that how you market yourself in social networks (in particularly your reputation ion social networks like twitter and Facebook) will begin to play a greater and greater significance in your rankings.


Put this together with every content management system adding more and more social functions and social networks themselves getting more traffic than Google and the writing is on the wall.

Search engine marketing and SEO are at the beginning of a merge.

This is actually a good thing for marketers. We no longer have to think of social network traffic and SEO traffic as two distinct strategies. They now can be one. In turn viral marketing (which often times gets most of its juice from social networks) can be integrated into real SEO.

The old days of thinking JUST about backlinks are almost OVER. Want a long term rank and ongoing traffic? You need to consider your social network strategies. What goes viral now and what sizzles in the social network world now can show up at the top of not only Google but Microsoft related sites like Yahoo and Bing (which can no longer be ignored now that they are approaching a third of the search market).

You can appear at the top of searches that have real time results AND your social network reputation can affect your rankings even when there are no real time results in that search.

So what should you be doing?

Well

A) you need to jump in or rethink your social network marketing strategy. Start spending some time with twitter and facebook. (as a SEO I have put that way in the back but am bringing it forward)

B) Get your site to integrate with Facebook, twitter and other social networks both for traffic and for SEO placement. The more natural it is to move between the big social networks and your site the greater signups, traffic and links you will see from users. Your goal is for them to not only socialize on third party social networks but on your own integrated community site.

C) Evaluate your backlink strategy for social networks. No direct links from the big networks do not help your SEO directly but the more users you have and the better reputation you have it will generally mean the more links you will get from users recommending your site from their blogs and from forums and followed comments etc.

I'm all ears as to other ways people have and will be using social networks. Post yours