Rock Star Lifestyle Design

Today I am happy to bring you another guest post, this time by Justin Freid. Justin is an upcoming youth marketer that specializes in SEO and Social Media. We had an opportunity to talk over the phone and had a great conversation that led to similar goals and ideas. I asked him to write a post and introduce himself to this audience. In this post Justin diggs into some of the new social aspects of search engines and how they may affect your personal brand.

Over the past few weeks major search engines such as Google and Bing have began to show blog posts, tweets and status updates on search engine results pages.

This new form of blended search has been cast under the name of Social Search. Google specifically stated that your social network is a large part of your life and their influence should contribute to your search for information. With tweets and blog posts showing up in search engine results, this presents an opportunity to utilize social media to associate your personal brand with highly searched terms.

As most people know, SEO doesn’t happen to a website overnight. The structuring of your website, creating great content and link building is a lengthy process. So if you are trying to brand yourself in an industry such as SEO or Marketing, you will have a tough time showing up on the first page of results for industry related terms.

With tweets, blog posts and status updates now taking up a spot on SERPs, this presents a great opportunity to overcome the length of time you would need to invest in SEO. By simply doing some keyword research and utilizing your social media profiles to broadcast your message and personal brand, you can begin to use Google and Bing’s social search for your benefit.

Here is what you need to do

Use a tool such as Google Keyword Tool and simply enter in a popular term for your industry, searching through the results to find highly searched terms. The results will show a green bar that shows how competitive the search terms is. Pick a few of these terms that relate to the brand you are trying to create and then utilize them in your blog posts and status updates. The terms you select should have a perfect storm of number of monthly searches and competitiveness. (High search volume, not extremely competitive)

The next step is integrating these keywords within your tweets, blog posts, status updates and social media profiles. Make sure not to overuse these terms and end up spamming your tweets and blog posts. The key is to wisely insert these terms into your status updates and blog post titles. This will help you take advantage of the new social search and have your profiles and blog posts show up in search results.

If you choose the right keywords and insert them effectively into your social media profiles, you may end up on the first page of search results for terms that no matter how hard you optimized your website for, you would never show up on.

The largest drawback of this tactic is that it borderlines spamming the search results. You need to attack this plan and post quality information in a tasteful manner. You could easily ruin all the personal branding you have done by filling your latest tweet with 25 hashtags.

Keep in mind that Google has not come out and said how long social results stay atop the new Social Search. It could be minutes, hours or days. So keep an eye on how long your updates stay atop Social Search results and post new quality content accordingly.

Justin Freid is an internet marketing entrepreneur specializing in SEO and social media marketing. Justin currently heads up Petersons.com’s SEO and social media marketing efforts and is pursuing a MBA in marketing from Philadelphia University. You can check out Justin’s views on SEO and Social Media at Justin Freid | SEO and Social Media Blog.