Social media has become an important aspect of marketing, public relations and SEO campaigns over the past few years. With the growing integration of marketing and SEO, it’s important to optimize your website (and brand) by influencing Google and other search engines in as many ways possible.
Social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook now hold high credibility in search engine results. By sharing your website and blog content on your social media feeds, you are adding to additional “backlinks” to your content, but it doesn’t end there. The whole idea behind social media is to interact with clients, friends, customers and other experts in your industry by being social. The more “shares” and interaction around your content triggers the search engines to look at your social media feeds and eventually your website, giving it higher rank.
There’s a lot more behind social media than just sharing content on Facebook and Twitter. Interacting and joining conversation is a large part of social media, but in terms of helping your website and business rank in search engines, combining SEO and social media can be very beneficial for you. Here are a few SEO tips to keep in mind when posting to social media feeds and networking with others.
1. Conduct keyword research: One of the first things SEO experts do is keyword research. Based on your type of business and the top areas you want to target, you can build a quality list of keyword combinations to use in your content and on your social media pages.
2. Research trending topics and popular current events before posting. Joining conversation around keywords that are already trending can help you “get on the map.” Taylor your posts or updates based on trending topics (if they’re relevant).
3. Can your readers share your content easily? Adding social media share buttons to your blog posts is important. Sharing is caring, right? Right. Like I mentioned above, the more conversation and “shares” around your content, the more likely Google is to pick it up. Make it easy for your readers to share on social sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, etc.
4. Measure results. In any campaign, whether it’s social media, SEO or public relations, it’s important to measure results. There’s always room to improve so find out what social media strategies are working for you and what’s not. Which posts interest people? What kind of topics are people more responsive to?
Using social media and SEO together is important. Because of social sites having such an impact in search engines, it’s crucial for businesses to become social if they want to improve their rank.
