This is what I have been talking about for so many months and John says it so eloquently: Read this post at least twice.
This content from: Duct Tape Marketing encourage you to read the entire post and the comments.
Search engine optimization has changed dramatically over the past few years. The shift is from one of web page optimization and link hounding to content and engagement optimization. In short, search engine optimization and social media are now undeniably intertwined. It has become extremely difficult to achieve any measure of success for important keyword phrases without the use of social media. (Of course the flip side to that is organizations that take advantage of social media can dominate, particularly within industries slow to adapt.)
I’m not suggesting that web page optimization and inbound links are no longer important, they are, they just might not be enough anymore. It is rare these days to do any kind of normal search that does not return results from social media sites. Blog content dominates many question related searches and videos, audios, and images are routinely mixed in on page one searches on both Google and Yahoo.
Any attempt to garner positive search results for your primary web site must be accompanied by a strategy to optimize your entire web presence through the effective use of social media. We can have another conversation altogether about the effective use of social media for engagement, but the first step is getting immersed in the content creation and optimization game.
Thanks John for describing it so well. But I would add that I think that the effective use of social media for engagement is gaining a lot of steam.