Curious about how social media can benefit your company? Maybe you’ve worked with SEO before, but are unsure how social media affects your ranking.

You can learn a lot of valuable information with the Social SEO Guidebook [6]. This guide created by Brick Marketing is a great tool for businesses looking to learn more about integrating social media and SEO.

What I liked about the Social SEO Guidebook:

In the free downloadable guide [7], Nick Stamoulis explains that there’s much more to social media than fan pages and tweeting once a month. Good social media campaigns require long-term commitment. Although these campaigns require continuous attention, the payoff is big—social media is an incredibly valuable tool in brand building and connecting to potential customers in a unique and intimate way.

The Social Media Guidebook presents a nice mix of explanation and overview with real, actionable tips in developing your social media and SEO strategy with suggestions for profile optimization, link building, voice development, and content generation.

The guide also offers some great insight into understanding how search engines like Google and Bing are influenced by social signals, and how these factors will affect your SEO and SERP ranking.

What I would have liked to see:

The guide is lacking in specific suggestions for social media sites. While a general explanation and screenshots of Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are provided, I would have liked to see the guide go more in-depth about which campaigns work best for each site and how to utilize them differently.

But it is free after all, and while the guide lacks in this area, it excels in others.

Understanding Why Social Media is Important to SEO

Ultimately, the guide really shines in helping readers understand why social media is important to SEO. A lot of focus is given to the importance of solid content creation and the promotion and sharing of that content. The guide provides a lot of valuable advice here, with information about:

• How to create various types of content
• Valuable topic ideas
• Strategies for promoting content
• Ways to recycle and tweak content for other platforms

Those looking to learn more about how to use SEO and social media together to improve their business will greatly benefit from this free guide.

Brick Marketing offers a variety of Social SEO Solutions [8] and SEO white papers [9] for businesses looking to improve their social media and SEO campaigns.

Want more SEO info? Try reading WordStream's Google SEO Guide [10].