When your site has poor presence on the major search engines, obviously your business is losing vast amounts of revenue. Web sites that are not easy to find via search miss out on bringing in new customers as well as repeat customers that use Google to find sites they already know about. The questions is whether the same is true for web sites that are not social media friendly? The short answer, of course, is Yes. Why?

Not only do people discover new sites through search, but they also rely on recommendations made via email, word of mouth and through social media content. Making a web site social media friendly will make it easier to share content with others, extend reach and facilitate engagement. 

Social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, favorite blogs, are often the starting point for discovering new content for an increasing number of internet users. Also, content creation and links that come as an outcome of social media participation can provide positive signals to search engines and affect search visibility. In a nutshell, making a site more social media friendly will expand the opportunity for content to be discovered directly and indirectly.

Search is the most efficient and effective way for consumers to discover content. That means for you that you need to put much more efforts to ensure your content strategy is taking advantages of the trends in information publishing, discovery and marketing right now.

Improving a web site’s availability to search engines as well as keyword usage and links (internal/external) helps the search engine provide better search results to consumers. It’ also helps companies marketing their products and services to attract more qualified buyers. Not only can web site traffic increase, but the right kind of visitors will self segment themselves by the keywords they use to search.

A study conducted by eMarketer shows B2B companies rate Search Marketing as one of their top marketing investments for 2009.  Another source also ranked SEO as a top digital marketing tactic for 2009.

The increasing demand for fresh, live web content as well as the expectation of consumers to interact with what they find in the search results demands that web site owners and content publishers make their web sites both search and social media friendly.

Here are a few ways web sites can make themselves more “Social Media Friendly”:

• Fresh content – To play the search and social media game, a web site must be in the content publishing business. Search engines and participants of the social web respond favorably to the signals created from frequent updates. 

• Social content – Not all of a company’s social web participation needs to happen offsite with third party tools. The addition of a blog, reviews, forum or even a social network to the company web site can provide intersted consumers opportunities to interact with other brand fans as well as the company.  

• Easy to share – Besides the ability to contribute to conversations happening on a corporate web site, there’s a tremendous opportunity and benefit to making it easy for site visitors to share that content with others.  Many sites offer “share this” options that make it easy for readers to submit the page being viewed to popular social bookmarking and social news web sites such as Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon.  Sharing options for Facebook, Twitter and email are also popular.Making it easy for web site visitors to share interesting content (web pages, video, images) facilitates the word of mouth recommendations people make in real life, except when done online, they become searchable assets.

The advantages of incorporating social features include improved online word of mouth, stimulating conversations with prospective customers and advocates and expanded market reach. The question is, are web marketing teams incorporating a social media strategy with their overall search marketing and vice versa?  

Are you making your web site search engine friendly for the social web?