Investing in SEO used to be the way for a brand to rank highly
in search engines, but the online landscape is constantly changing
- and social media is now a way for companies to make their
websites more visible to customers.
Search engines are putting more and more emphasis on shared
content and quite rightly so - that the more it's shared between
peers, the more interesting the content actually is. Google no
longer takes just keywords and links into account when it's ranking
a website, but also the brand's influence on social networks. 2011
has seen the arrival of Google+, Panda and Freshness updates to its
algorithm - all changes which have made search increasingly
social.
So, what does this mean for brands? Businesses are more able to
influence search engine results through their social strategy than
ever before. When we go to Google, we want to find what we're
looking for as quickly as possible and social media helps us to
locate more relevant real-time results, so brands will be forced to
focus on what they should be doing - creating interesting content
which people feel inspired to share.
Here's an interesting article about the top ten most significant
search and social marketing stories of
2011.