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Search, Social Move BrightEdge To Create New SEO Tool

Jim-yu-

Google, Bing and Yahoo brought social media into search, but what if marketers could predict the impact on search engine optimization? Having the perfect tool to optimize social media would surely help. SEO firm BrightEdge released a platform Monday that does just that. It analyzes the content of tweets and Facebook Likes to pinpoint the areas in social media that can boost SEO, and offers actionable recommendations to increase activity and measurable return on investments (ROIs).

The integration of social into the SEO platform adds all possible factors such as on-page, off-page and site structure that might impact SEO such as titles tags, H tags, content, external links and URL structure. It automatically prioritizes these signals and offers unique reporting and recommendations through a dashboard to determine what key actions a marketer needs to take to improve their performance. The platform feature focuses on identifying competitive social media strategies that impact organic search rankings.

The platform identifies specific terms, keywords and activities that search engines use as signals for authority and are integrated into the BrandSafe Link Audit Program, which identifies black hat SEO tactics that artificially improve a site's ranking against important search terms that, if discovered, might negatively impact a brand.

BrandSafe identifies abnormal patterns of links, link farms, and high-value links originating from the wrong context sites or pages. It will identify abnormal activity from social media. Quite amazing, really, if it works as BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu describes it.

Google's recent algorithmic change that affects nearly 12% of search queries makes this integration more important, according to Yu. The update supports better relevance of search results. As the changes created by this update become increasingly stable, Yu expects to see a growing impact of Twitter and Facebook on SEO.

As search integrates social, SEO experts will need to pay more attention to signals. Until now, marketers relied on UTM tags that are often attached to URLs and bit.ly code that allows marketers to monitor the clicks on links, according to Making8.com Founder Adam Humphreys. "There's a number of key performance indicators (KPIs) used to measure the success of a link on social media or any online marketing campaign," he says.

Targeted meta-data through social signals prequalifies people better than Google often can -- which means higher revenue for retailers, Humphreys says. He believes "it's all about having healthy search verticals and an integration of social media and SEO" into the overall communication strategy.

Most social media campaigns don't engage, which creates problems, Humphreys says. Reliable-SEO Account Manager Terry Van Horne couldn't agree more. Since social signals provide access to more personal information, Google's new "social algo" actually re-ranks the search engine results pages (SERP) to view what your friends share, Van Horne explains.

The integration of social and search should spur a series of new tools. Until now, the integration has not attracted the type of attention to move an industry. "Influence is huge, but there are multiple ways and tools people use today to measure it," Van Horne says. "The tools are just starting to collect the right data."

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