You may have a view on the social web and how it can work for your business.  The chances are that you are still unsure about how social media sites like Twitter or Facebook are actually going to work for you – especially if your target audience are not likely to be reading your Tweets or following you on Facebook.

Well the truth is that the social web is here to stay.  And although it may not be immediately obvious what that means for your business, it is clear that it represents the chatter that is going on in the business world. So how do you benefit from it?

The search engines live and die by their ability to find out about what is being said and what is current.  Their goal is to provide the most up to date information related to your search.  If you are interested in or want to join in with the chatter then the search engines must help you to achieve that objective.

For example, if you had a website which was all about house prices and the economy and let us suppose that you hadn’t changed any page on your site or added any information for over a year.  Now it just so happens that we enter into this massive house price crash and all of a sudden people are concerned about repossessions and rising interest rates then there would be no surprise if all of a sudden your site started to ranked lower in the search engines compared to new entries found on Twitter and in the media.  The reason for this is due to the more topical natures of what is current.  The search engines need to provide people with information related what is happening now – first, then they server information.  And social media sites represent what is happening now.

But how does that help you when you know your audience are not likely to be on Twitter?

The answer to this and many related social media and social book marking questions form the basis of how we make social media a central element in an effective SEO strategy for all businesses.