Social media SEO has become an important factor with changes to search engine algorithms. SEO has been an integral part of digital marketing for a long time now. However, search engine algorithms now look for pages and blog posts shared on different social media networks and the number of shares that they get.
What is Social Media SEO
Social media SEO integrates your activities on your website with those on the social media networks. This integrated activity provides search engines such as Google Search a holistic view of your business and allows them to judge your credibility. Shares, Tweets, Likes, and Clicks all add up to pushing your blog posts higher up the search results.
Why you need it
The Panda and Penguin updates now give more weightage to social signals associated to the page than traditional SEO techniques. Similarly, the new Google Search features rank higher the pages that are shared by people in your Google Plus circles. But it is not only about search engine algorithms. People are spending more time on social networks and as a result search for information using social search interfaces such as Facebook Search and Twitter Hashtags. Additionally, the voluntary connection between friends and acquaintances also makes the suggestions by connections more believable and honest than a sponsored ad on the page. You need to build a strong social presence that will give you the exposure you need and drive traffic to your website to benefit from these new dynamics.
Create profiles and build a network
To ensure that search engines receive your post signals from social media, you must first have personal and business profiles across different networks. Your business sector should guide your decision to select the right social media networks. However, it is advisable to have profiles on Google Plus, LinkedIn, and Facebook to begin your social media SEO campaign. Participate in groups and communities to build a network, which in turn will share your posts with other members.
Share your posts
Although Facebook and Linkedin are more popular, Google Search is still the leader in search engines and the driving force behind many other search engines. Google Plus, obviously, is the most important network for Google Search. Share your posts on your Plus profile and also on your Google business page. The same applies for search with Facebook. Facebook’s Graph Search shows results that your friends have liked. Sharing posts on these networks will help them rank your posts and pages up in search results. Your website is crawled at a predetermined rate by Search engines, however, a Twitter feed is crawled much more frequently than websites. Make sure that you share your posts on Twitter regularly.
Expert Speak
Cheryl Conner of Snapp Conner PR shares some interesting tips on how you can ease into using social media to boost your SEO efforts. However, she rightly warns that it won’t happen overnight and that you need to look at it as a long term, continuous activity. Integrated marketing also needs a lot of tweaks to your website. Things can be quite easy if you are a WordPress user and have SEO by Yoast installed on your WordPress website. Joost de Valk explains how you can use the WordPress plugin’s features to optimize your WordPress site for social SEO.