How to Leverage Social Search for Maximum SEO Results

Over the years, consultants and SEO firms have worked hard to improve organic search results for their clients. With the emergence of social media the landscape again changed and search became for lack of a better term, “social”. There are two types of social search emerging – general and real-time. We cover the most popular tool in each area – Google Social Search and Twitter Search.

General Social Search with Google Social Search

Google has put together their Google Profile site and has enabled Social Search. According to its blog, “Google finds relevant public content from your friends and contacts and highlights it for you at the bottom of your search results. When I do a simple query for [new york], Google Social Search includes my friend’s blog on the results page under the heading “Results from people in your social circle for New York.” I can also filter my results to see only content from my social circle by clicking “Show options” on the results page and clicking “Social.”"

This is a great explanation of Google Social Search from their blog:

Their blog goes on to say “all the information that appears as part of Google Social Search is published publicly on the web — you can find it without Social Search if you really want to. What we’ve done is surface that content together in one single place to make your results more relevant. The way we do it is by building a social circle of your friends and contacts using the connections linked from your public Google profile, such as the people you’re following on Twitter or FriendFeed. The results are specific to you, so you need to be signed in to your Google Account to use Social Search. If you use Gmail, we’ll also include your chat buddies and contacts in your friends, family, and coworkers groups. And if you use Google Reader, we’ll include some websites from your subscriptions as part of your social search results.”

Real-Time Social Search with Twitter Search

2009 has seen the explosion of Twitter as the hot tool of the year and it was even voted the best new word of the year. One of the most important parts of the site and what makes it extremely useful is its Twitter Search site. As you can see in the image below that it is a simple and clean interface like Google but below the search window it is showing the top trends that people are talking about in real time.

You can use search to find conversations, people and topics that you can use for ongoing searches. The trends are fascinating and take the concept of “Zeitgeist” all the way to its limits.

Leveraging this in your SEO activities

Both of these tools are capturing information from people from their social media activities. The way to leverage this in your SEO activities is to do the following things:

1. Create a Google Profile and put in all your social media profiles so it knows how to spider all your conversations
2. Use Twitter search to type in keywords you are interested in and see what people are talking about
3. Use your social media channels to add to this conversation.
4. Repeat.

I know that might all sound too simplistic but that is what it really comes down to – tell people who you are and where to find you and just engage. So what are you waiting for?