I continuously speak regarding link building still (and always) being an important element of SEO and rankings historically as well as in the future.  Link building will always be with us, it’s just changing on how to get the best links toward your sites.  OSE and other tools offer excellent software to give a prespective on each of the softwares interpratation as to what they deem the best links pointing to your site.  These are great tools to evaluate you and your competitors link landscape to consider new platforms and sites for link requests.

So, enter Social Marketing or Engagement Optimization into SEO/SMO.  It’s given at this point that you understand having social share options on every page of your site and that you are integrated within the social graph with the correct meta/code to capture any juice related to engagement.  It’s also understood that you have your sites on many platforms (Facebook, LinkedIN, Twitter, YouTube and more).  That being said, how do you go the next step and gain more likes, tweets and +1s?

Well, Twitter is the easiest of all as data is showing the global audience accepting this platform as the starting point for engagement.  I’ve incorporated a custom domain with my bit.ly account to see better data related to has retweeted me and then proactively reached out to those @handles and thanked them with an above 75% follow conversion rate.  In addition, there are many tools to automate the labor intensive practice of Follow/Unfollow pruning to increase followership.  With these tools you can anticipate a 10% increase in followers consistently without even touching your account.

But the “firehose” is off and data from Twitter (and Facebook) is off to Google.  Google is displaying G+ information marginally higher then others, which leads us to the Antitrust discussion (and Google Anti-SOPA and Antitrust video we distributed which accumulated over 3,000 views).  Thus, the engagement of Facebook and Twitter will certainly have a great advantage on the Bing/Yahoo side at this time.  Consider more activity in Google+ (personal and brand) for more authority within the graph and toward your pages.

Lastly, LinkedIN as a link-bait tool and brand authority magnet is my all time favorite.  Tools available within their pro membership allow for more advanced networking to find prospects.  ”Do Follow” links (three of ‘em) and a lot of great spots for continuous content to be placed lead to a nice platform.  Add in the blog aggregation and other apps (albeit, a little limited at this time) and LinkedIN is the professional platform.

Introducing Pinterest, Quora and other new and exciting opportunities for the future of social and it leads us to a never ending land of opportunity for continued engagement optimization.  Always connect your platforms to extend your reach and evaluate potential followers and members Klout score to prioritize your outreach efforts.

While I believe this is the year Twitter will boost even further into mainstream it is my further observation that Social Optimization and Brand Management have pushed their ways into the algorithms.  Now it is GOogle (and SE’s) responsibility to weight their influence accordingly, and not merely by correlation of product/service.

So, new SEO strategies have become a battle between four main compnents:  Trust, Brand, Links and Social.  This comes as no surprise with Goolge+ and the “New Social Search Engine”, personalized search and many more key indicators telling us that this movement is upon us. While traditional SEO is still practical and foundational it is clear that employing these strategies is a high priority for your campaigns.

So consider these segments, to be in the Final Four of an SEO tournament, nevermind the seatings for now as we will assume that their was a fair distribution in who plays who for a chance to make it to the big dance.

Match 1:  Trust vs. Brand

Trust
Now more than ever there is an emphasis on trust.  How trustworthy is the site and its partners?  The on-site technical work as well as the authoritativeness of the content related to grammar and spelling as well as relevency of topic.  It’s a good thing to see this hold weight as Google wants to serve up the best results for its users and the more trustworthy a site is then the more weight it should hold.

Brand
Earlier this year we saw a clear shift toward the brand.  Meaning, Google giving better positioning to brands that have been established and are reputable to related keywords, specifically in ECOM situations.  The latest freshness update provides data that supports the importance of brand as this content (News/ECOM) maintains a shorter lifespan, so it is clear that weight should be shifted more toward brands.

WINNER:  Trust
Given the definition of authority content and usefulness provided to users, many more of the trust elements are built within the Brand segment (although you could argue the same for Brand)

Match 2: Link vs. Social

Link (Graph)
And I add (Graph) here to emphasize a domains landscape with both internal and external links.  Traditional SEO has always been weighted heavy on the amount of backlinks a domain can receive and the relevancy and authoritativeness of those links pointing inward.  In addition, internal links allow users and bots to understand a sites infrastructure and are important.

Social
Sharing content via social platforms and bookmarking sites is the new age of link building and a powerful way to network, gain authoritative associations and provide a channel for content marketing in a viral fashion.  With Google+ added into the mix it is evident, and confirmed, that this type of content sharing is a high priority for SEO campaigns

WINNER:  Social
While in-content links and blog commenting are great for increasing the amount of links you have it is evident that sites can gain more authority by leveraging SMO efforts to repurpose content.  This practice allows domains to increase fans, followers, traffic and rankings due to the relevancy of the network.

Final Match:  Trust vs. Social

WINNER:  Social
Considering the implementation of efforts for a campaign, an aggresive SMO effort would clearly be more valuable than focusing on a non-defined trust rank.  Trust is a mixture of On-Site/Off-Site one time implementations with continued social monitoring.  Trust = Optimization and Monitoring; while Social is a proactive method of seeking to share knowledge and earn community engagement.

While every campaign situation is determined by the ultimate question of, “What do you consider a successful campaign to be?” it is more often that the answer is more users, traffic and revenues – Social allows for a clear beginning, middle and end.