It's Link or Swim: Don't Get Left Behind
At one time, social media and search engine optimization operated independently of one another, but that’s no longer the case. Now, SEO is more important than ever for social media campaigns to help you move up in the search rankings and get a lot more exposure.
We talked recently about marketing your business using social media, but let’s dive deeper on how social media and SEO specifically are linked.
Social Signals
Search engines analyze social signals when determining a website’s ranking. They are giving extra weight to social profiles that have a lot of likes, shares and other signs of engagement. The reason for this is simple. Unlike some other SEO tactics, it’s hard to fake engagement. Of course, there are some spammers out there who pay for likes and shares, but this isn’t a serious issue yet.
In order to benefit from social signals, you need to increase your engagement across social media networks. You can do this by putting a call-to-action in some of your posts, asking questions, and creating polls. People love contests; consider running one from time to time.
Getting Links for Social Media
Link building is an important aspect of search engine optimization, and now you can use social media to build some of those links. There are a couple of ways you can do this. First, put social share buttons on your website and blog. Then, when people share your content on their social media pages, you will get a link that points back to your website.
Also, put your own links in your status updates and tweets. However, you have to do this correctly in order to get the best results.
For instance, let’s say you create an eBook to give away to your potential customers. You want to put the eBook on your website and then provide a link to it on your Facebook page. Make sure you put the file on a page that has already been indexed and ranked by the search engines. If you put it on a new page, you won’t get the same benefits you would if you added it to an existing page.
Social Search
Social search is another way that SEO and social media are coming together. Social search is the process of search engines pulling results from social network connections when someone conducts a search. Additionally, some networks also pull results from influencers in the market. For instance, if you have a solid profile on Google+, you might show up in search results, even if you aren’t connected with the searcher. It’s important to note, though, that the person will have to be signed in to Google to see your Google+ profile in the results.
Bing and Klout have paired up to take social search to the next level. People who sign into Facebook with Bing can use the site’s social search feature. The feature pulls results from Facebook friends, as well as major influencers.
If you are going to take advantage of social search, you have to do a few things. First, you need to include relevant keywords in your profile and posts. Then, you need to increase engagement and build your reputation on the social networks. Finally, you need to get as many fans and followers as possible. The greater your reach is, the better chance you will have of showing up in social search results.
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By Drew Himel