When people suddenly, years after it became mainstream, realised that search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay per click (PPC) strategies could be joined together, these was a big fuss. Then everyone realised that it wasn’t anything significant, you just needed to ensure that your SEO team and PPC team were working together. Of course this becomes difficult if you run it across two different agencies or if the internal structure of that agency isn’t set up to do so.

Our belief will always be that there should be one “search strategy”. That person leading the strategy should know PPC and SEO inside out. But perhaps that’s a pipe dream at the moment, given the shortage of experience SEO/PPC people in the industry.

So, before we have even managed to get to grips with that, everyone is suggesting that we now focus on search and social, eeek!

So what do we do? What with Facebook Vanity URLs coming out, there has been a flurry of blog articles coming out advising to optimise your Facebook pages and twitter profiles. Great if you are a business to optimise you brand name. Chances are that you are already number 1.

So how can SEO and social media be used to help your business?

You don’t have to be an expert at both to do the basics:

• Set up social profiles – sign up to Facebook and Twitter. Both are free and are easy to set up.
  • Optimise Facebook – get fans, build interest, get your facebook vanity URL, link from your profile page to your website.
  • Optimise Twitter – get your twitter account and get it optimised for your business name .
• Blog - blogging is a great way of building interest around your business. Write articles around the latest industry news and optimise them well for key search terms and link out to other areas of your site.
• Create valuable content – this one is very important. Making interesting and relevant content for your audience will set you apart form the competition.
• Make your content portable – make any content you produce for your site shareable. Videos, whitepapers, gadgets, images, etc. are a great way to get people to link to your site. Getting inbound links is great for improving your rankings.
• Learn about SEO – the basics of social media are easy, it’s about being social online. But learning about how SEO works can help improve your basic knowledge.
• Get engaged – spend time with your customers, get to know them online. They will naturally want to tell others about you online. More links, better rankings.
• Get involved – get involved with other blogs and networks. Submit stories other than your own and be an active participant.
• Let everyone know – get yourself out there doing the following:
  • Submit your stories to Digg ,Reddit and Propeller
  • Get fans and share your stories on Facebook
  • Tweeter about your latest article
  • Get blogged about

There’s no golden rules here. You need to understand SEO and social media to pull it off. But word of mouth is a powerful marketing tool and if you create deep engagement with your customers/users then this will pay off. Once you have that it’s understanding how to harness the power of this through SEO, something you may want to consider using an search agency for.

This post was written by Jeremy Jacobs, owner of The Digital Consultant

The launch of Facebook vanity URLs has had the social media industry alive with buzz. Find out what all the fuss is about.

For those who don’t know, Facebook has given users the opportunity to register a “vanity URL”. Up until now there’s been no easy way to share your Facebook page with anyone. With vanity URLs, once you have registered, people can find you by going to www.facebook.com/YourUsername. Fear not, your privacy settings will remain the same, so for those who are a little concerned with protecting their identities, you’re OK!

The idea is that it makes your Facebook profile shareable with other people. This means you can start sending it to all your friends, posting it on twitter and so on. It will also make your Facebook profile indexable by the search engines. Not that they haven’t been before, but it will mean that your profile will be more likely to rank highly for your username.

Companies/famous people etc. with over 1,000 fans will be able to register their user names, something that is more significant than Joe Bloggs being able to register www.facebook.com/joebloggs. This has given rise to the rather unfortunate phrase “face squatting”. A term that was bounded around twitter a lot yesterday in an attempt to get CNN to use the phrase in their news reports. Not sure if that was successful!

I digress, so with the fear that brands will not be able to register their trademark names, Facebook set up a “pre-register”. It did state that this was no guarantee and that no response would be given to your pre-registering. It clearly shows that Facebook are preparing themselves for some legal battles much like Google had when they removed trademark bidding in the UK. We’ll have to wait and see what happens there!

This post was written by Jeremy Jacobs, owner of The Digital Consultant

• Get your Facebook vanity URL (FYI, you must be logged in to Facebook).
• Read about The Digital Consultant’s online marketing services.