However, what SEOs consider “social media” is not the same as how many other marketers define it. SEOs tend to focus on whatever will give them links and traffic over building community, branding or relationships. This perspective is crystal clear by conference sessions, blog posts and forum threads on the topic within the SEO industry.

The opportunity for many of the digital marketing, interactive, PR and advertising efforts is to consider SEO as an additional channel when creating social media strategies. In the context of content publishing, social media efforts provide crawlable content (text, media) as well as signals (links) affecting how those assets are sorted in search results.

As the social web grows, the expectation for consumers in their information discovery and recommendation habits will increasingly involve a combination of what’s available via search and social media. Just remember, if it can be searched on, it can be optimized.

Check out “How Does Social Media Affect Search?” for more thoughts on that.

http://www.highrankings.com/forum/

http://www.buzzstream.com/blog/seo-and-pr-are-merging.html

There’s lots of talk among SEOs today about the fact that nothing moves the search results needle more than off-page factors, the largest of which is inbound links. The old methods of building phony links and trying to game Google just don’t work any more (and if you want to bet on anything, bet that Google will just keep getting better at sniffing out illegitimate link building strategies). So how then do you increase your inbound links in today’s environment? By creating great content and building strong relationships. Sounds like a big PR and social media strategy to me : )