After a deliciously interesting lunch roundtable session, we are back in presentation-mode.  Our own Janet Driscoll Miller is presenting on your social presence and its impact on Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Here are 6 ways your social media efforts impact SEO:

1 Social Media Profiles Rank Well Naturally

It is typical that social media profiles tend to rank well.  By establishing your social profiles across a few social platforms, you can protect your brand on the first page of search engine results. This will help you own that first page of results, which will simultaneously help keep bad press out of the top ten.

Image by matteopenzo via Flickr

Over the past few weeks, I’ve started attending a weekly Twitter chat hosted by @ion_interactive on the subject of conversion rate optimization (or CRO, the science of designing website pages and landing pages to maximize conversion rate).  Each week at the same time, people who are interested in the topic start following the Twitter hashtag #CROchat.  They append all their comments with the same tag so that others can read them as part of the larger conversation.

In essence, a Twitter chat functions much like the live chat room from days of yore- and the “conversations” that occur in a Twitter chat are recorded so that you can reference them on Twitter forever.

What have I gotten from these weekly Twitter chats? Quite a lot!

• Gotten insight from experts on a subject that is inter-related with what we do at Search Mojo
• Shared relevant testing we have done at Search Mojo – and gotten reactions and feedback
• Expanded my network – I now regularly follow and talk with a number of the experts I met in Twitter chats.

But beyond the obvious value of engagement and networking, the Twitter chat as a channel also has the potential to provide indirect SEO benefits to its participants. We’ve all heard of the upcoming changes to the Google ranking formula that will probably emphasize a number of social media factors under the new Caffeine algorithm.  So obviously, it’s important to be active in social media at any level.