Social media and search are connected. This should come as no surprise as most SEO practitioners have been yelling about this for months now. Recent studies have shown that consumers exposed to a brand’s social media were more than 2 times as like to click over to that brand’s organic listing.

So…which social media platforms should you target? Should your brand be on Facebook? Twitter? YouTube? MySpace? Friendster? Digg? How do YOU define social media? How do you know which social media site to leverage to reach your potential audience? Is one social media more “searchable” than another? Should you concentrate your efforts on Facebook or MySpace? Are Facebook users more likely to click a link than Twitter users? What is the correlation between branded social media exposure and search? Do any of the clicks result in conversions? What good are first page listings and massive amounts of traffic if the visitors bounce quickly from your site? Traffic is a valuable goal but conversion is the goal!

The outgrowth of social media as a marketing and community building tool definitely impacts search marketing. The way Internet users search as well as their expectations for search results have changed. They no longer expect an information based result. They now expect to interact with the results. No longer are they content with just bookmarking/favoriting their search results. Now searchers want to share it or leverage it with other searchers in their circle of friends or followers. Enabling more dynamic interaction with search through social bookmarks, messaging, publishing and networking is making consumers raise the level of expectation for even more interaction with search results.

Because consumers have long been trained to have specific search expectations, they are now seeking those same search characteristics to search for information on social media sites. People do not trust corporate marketing. Instead they turn within to their inner circle of “friends” to get recommendations and references and personal reviews of goods/products/services. They actively seek out opinions as well as share their own through various social media channels. New review “social” sites are popping up everywhere and merchants are scrambling to establish a presence on them. Some even go so far as to create ‘fake’ listings to pad the search engines.

So how does social media’s impact on search affect SEO? First consider some of the elements of SEO for a landing page on a website and how similar they are to the landing pages for a social media site profile. Good SEO requires:

• Keywords
• Links
• Good related content
• Easily shared (save, share, submit, interact plugins)

If the content is not good no amount of SEO will create the atmosphere for social interaction. If the content does not encourage a specific action what’s the point? Enabling landing pages for bookmarking, sharing, or commenting just makes sense. But how does this impact/relate to search?

A person conducting a basic search is trying to resolve a question or problem by using a search engine and a string of words or phrases. They filter through the returned results to find an answer or they continue searching. They cull through the hardcore marketing messages as a rule and look for quality content. They look for content and links that closely match their search terms.

Following the theory of effective SEO, social media marketing efforts should focus their efforts on keyword rich valuable content, link and tag analysis, and continually updating that content. Social media marketing that fulfills these elements, creates a buzz, and gets shared influences search queries for those keywords thus driving search traffic. Social media marketing efforts can often result in an idea or discussion going viral. When that happens people search for the keywords related to that message. The results will pull related content created by savvy marketers as well as discussions from social media. Optimized content from a particular brand in multiple places gives that company multiple positions in search results. The fact that their content is socially enabled (Share This widget) then lets new searchers distribute content with their own social network creating more opportunity for search ranking. Creating optimized content that is easy search and includes features that make it easy to share empowers the searcher to link to the content, generate related content (reviews and blogs), and drives it into further visibility with search engines like Google and Bing. Give the people what they are looking for…search optimized content that has a social element!