Social media marketers have often looked down on the murky, grey/black hat world of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). But all that’s set to change. SEO and social media marketing are in the process of merging in an unholy, but potentially hugely valuable alliance. “Social Search” is the buzz phrase that’s grabbing headlines, but from the marketing perspective, what were talking about is social SEO.

I read a fascinating article from the mercurial SEOMoz today that sheds light on some of the big questions that many social media marketers are struggling with. Thankfully our SEO friends have done more homework on this and unearthed some fascinating answers:

Do Tweets, Likes and +1′s enhance your Google ranking?

Yes – absolutely they do. As you can see from the chart above, Google Buzz links, Facebook shares and Tweets all contribute to the ranking of a web-page, more so in fact than having the keyword as the first word in the title (a well-known old school SEO requirement). SEOMoz writer, Tom Crichlow, goes as far as to say “In my opinion this is why inbound marketing is going to overtake SEO as the primary function of SEO professionals. Engaging across social channels to get links, shares, likes, comments and +1s is going to be the future for generating organic traffic to your site”.

Can companies “Game” social media as they do with SEO?

Not easily. I’m sure they will find a way, but while setting up a bogus blog and linking to other sites simply requires a bogus email account, adding +1′s and Like’s requires the creation of a profile. Google and Facebook will doubtless use the amount of data they hold for an individual to rate the quality of their interactions and root out the “gamers”. By checking our your Google Dashboard, you can see how far reaching this data can go.

Does the authority of the social media user matter?

Yes – As this post explains, Google and Bing both look at the “Author Authority” (or “Social Authority”) when making decisions about the value to ascribe to social media mentions, +1′s and Likes. In a case of a Twitter user, this includes the # of followers they have and the # of people they follow. SEOMoz predicts that, in future, other indicators will come into consideration, such as the quality of friends/followers and the consistency of your relevance to the keywords being searched for.

I’m genuinely amazed that Social SEO isn’t dominating discussions on social media marketing today. If nothing else, Social SEO represents a wholly valid metric against which to measure a company’s social media engagement activities. Far from fluff and chatter, your Likes and re-tweets can now be shown contribute directly to lead generation. If you aren’t already, you should get on the social SEO band-waggon, and fast.

SEOptimise will be giving a presentation on opportunities in Social SEO in London on 19th September.

Useful, or an annoying gimmick?

So Google has speeded up search. Brilliant! But then again, it was pretty damn fast already, wasn’t it? I don’t recall popping out for a coffee while their servers chugged away before this announcement. So why the fuss?  I suppose it’s a differentiating factor from Bing, and in a market where the differences between search engines are dramatically narrowing, from a user perspective at least, this could be a selling point. It certainly has the gimmick factor and that’ll last at least a few weeks (Google Wave anyone?).

That said, I’m not 100% sure want my incomplete searches to flash before my eyes each time I do a search. I’ve always found predictive text searches more irritating than people who finish off my sentences, and I’ve already found myself shouting “Just wait!” at my screen, as Google leaps to early conclusions about what I’m interested in. In the end though, the result is the same. Which kinda makes you wonder what all the fuss is about.

Buzz Stream – A powerful tool for monitoring social media mentions and building relationships with influencers.  From $50/month you can track a number of keywords and analyse the sites (and authors) engaging in conversations about them. The tool combines social media monitoring with influence analysis (MozRank etc.) and blogger outreach tools that can extract the blogger’s email address and LinkedIn URL.

Influence Finder – Matt Roberts from LinkDex, the VC-funded UK-based start-up that runs Influence Finder, attended the Meetup and gave an impressive description of this new SEO tool (backed up by Murray Newlands, who uses it). Apparently it excels at helping you identify high quality link-building prospects by cutting out irrelevant, valueless blogs and sites. It also offers powerful segmentation features, enabling you to identify blogs that are open to linking to your site (those that allow guest posts, for example). Sounds like a great tool.

Xenu’s Link Sleuth – Download Link Sleuth and run it on your site to check your internal links and identify pages that need more or better targeted internal links. Definitely a worthwhile thing to do once in a while and apparently it’s excellent at it.

Market Samurai – Once you get past the irritating sales video, this sounds like a useful tool for identifying target markets, finding suitable keywords, topics for blog posts you should write etc. Sounds like a good all-rounder. It currently costs $149.00.

Link Diagnosis – This site enables you to analyse who’s linking to your competitors sites, what types of links they are (such as no-follow) and what anchor text they are using. On the basis that sites linking to your competitors might want to link to you, Link Diagnosis could be a powerful weapon in your SEO armoury.

OpenSiteExplorer – Essentially a copy of Yahoo’s Site Explorer tool which identifies back-links to your site. It was apparently created by SEO giant SEOMoz following fears that, with Bing taking over Yahoo’s search capabilities, Site Explorer and other Yahoo API-based tools will be discontinued.

If you’re interested in Inbound Marketing, you should come to the London Inbound Marketing Meetup (monthly) or join the Inbound Marketing Forum on LinkedIn.