What is the SEM impact of YouTube and Flickr?

A few weeks ago we identified SEM. Now we need to explore some of the ways Web site owners can use Social Media (social networks, blogs, videos, podcast, Wikis, DIGG, etc) to promote a site. For the purposes of this post we will only discuss YouTube and Flickr but there are clearly many other sites that fall into the Social Media Category.

You may have noticed image and video results are now integrated into any search on Google. For Google specifically, those image and video results come directly from integration with YouTube and Flickr (note: there may be less and less of Flickr with the recent acquisition by Yahoo). With this integration, Web Site owners can gain so much – not only because we can add our own videos and images to these social media sites, but because our site visitors can be our medium to market. Instead of thinking about bots and crawlers, in social media we should think about visitors who may want to grab images, videos or even visit our sites which may provide tools for them to create their own videos or images using our brands.

Both YouTube and Flickr provide places to add description, tags and even broadcast options for each media item you add. As a result, adding videos and images to these sites and being as descriptive about them as possible will help us take advantage off the benefits of these sites and its integration to search engines. This integration is one of the many benefits we see with search engines providing a way to find real and relevant content (or media) to any search.

After getting the idea for this post I did some research and there is now a term for using Social Media to help your SEM initiatives; I give you Social Media Optimization (SMO). Thus, with the rise of this new medium, there is a requisite change in thinking about the way we design, engineer, and market for the new web.