Social media and how it works in conjunction with organic SEO is an emerging field. While the impact of social media has been discussed and accepted as having an HUGE impact, it is only since the Panda update that the true significance can be easily seen and quantified.

There is a LOT of companies advertising social media management services but the sad fact is, the majority are offering little more than setting up fake Twitter/ Facebook profiles.

I've been preaching the value of social media in terms of seo for over 2 years now and have recently developed a blogging tool that embraces the very essence of why social media can be more relevant than page rank ever was (Page Rank is Dead).  The "key" element is simply getting other people who are known to have some degree of experience or expertise with a specific topic, to discuss and link to your page, post or comment.

If you haven't already read the "filter bubble" I urge you to at least familiarize yourself with the core concept. It explains the technology behind making social commentary more relevant very well. It is all about personalization! Now that search engines can gather and categorize data relating to a single individual, the amount and accuracy of the collected data empowering them to determine what that individual is "into", is amazing and more than a little scary.

But to me at least it makes perfect sense. When there are millions of made for adsense sites with all the shenanigans often applied to dominate SERPs compared to knowing someone knowledgeable is offering advice about a specific topic, without benefit of compensation beyond the basic human desire for acceptance and validation, I've got to go with the human every time.

Without getting into the irony of the source of income for all those adsense sites, it's not too difficult to see how spidering data and delivering ads based on the context of the text coupled with the number and loosely defined "quality" of inbound links to determine what is relevant as compared to knowing the history, income source, educational level, geo location, ( just to mention a few key indicators), engaging with another like-minded individual, it is easy to see how one system can be controlled and manipulated much easier than the other.

This is the primary reason we see so few traditional SEO services extolling the virtues of social media SEO. It is simply not an easy thing to understand how to get humans to engage with a target source. It's much easier to impersonate, automate and regurgitate.

BUT it is changing because it can be done. I know I'm doing it everyday now.

We are getting the kind of results we were getting back in the days of Infoseek, Alta Vista, Hotbot and Excite. When a single page could hit #1 within a matter of minutes sometimes! THAT is exciting.

I'm not claiming to be an expert on social media SEO. Not yet anyway. It's is still far too new a discipline to claim to have all the answers. BUT I have a lot of them.

It's like the old adage, I don't know everything about anything but when it comes to social media SEO, I've been doing it long enough now to claim to know SOMETHING about everything. I bet you will be asking a lot of the same questions I did when I started and THOSE I can answer. I could probably save you a lot of time by just telling you things that DON'T work because I found a lot of those until I found what DOES work.

So, if you are seeing social media playing a larger and larger role in organic search engine marketing but aren't sure you see the logic and how to best implement some of those techniques into your own efforts, ASK ME!

I may not be able to answer. I may have to ask my staff to research and try to find the answer. They may not be able to answer. BUT one thing I believe I've proven over the last 16 years is that I may not be able to tell you what you want to hear, BUT I will tell you the truth.

Ask me your social media seo questions and we'll discuss it and see if together we can't get a handle on this new world SEO!

Peach Y'all
Bob Massa, CEO Techndu Internet Services, Pvt Ltd

Proud Parent of Blikini - the Social Media SEO Management Machine