Are You Harnessing Social Media for its SEO Benefits?

social media

Marketing via social media, when done right, can tremendously boost SEO. This means that social media can help your website rank for keywords that you are pursuing. Both SMM and SEO are organic marketing techniques. Used together, they save you money and lay down the foundation for a strong website that will generate organic traffic.

SMM has a salutary effect on SEO and in turn benefits from good SEO practices; it is a symbiotic relationship and the reason is easy to understand. Both marketing practices rely heavily on content.

The first step is to have quality followers. A high number of followers is no doubt good, but search engines can weed out weak and purchased accounts quite easily. Develop a follower base, Google will notice and will deposit the necessary good karma in your SEO account. Influential followers can really spread the word for you and propagate your content. You get traffic and one-way backlinks. Offsite search engine optimization does not get better than this.

With respect to the inbound links mentioned above, you need to have a strategy in place to encourage other sites to link to your social media pages. The fundamental thing is to have quality content on social media pages. Broadcast your content through social media; use short powerful posts to point to your well-written and helpful blog posts. Post quizzes, infographics, and videos. Look up hashtags and use them; twitter is the best platform to harness the power of hashtags. These can drive traffic to your website.

Pick a sub-niche or two in your business and aim at becoming the best resource of breaking news and useful information for these subjects on social media. Consistency is key. Once you gain momentum, and your updates become popular, they will begin to appear for search terms.

Whatever you do on social media, you need to ensure that the posts are as optimized as possible for the search engines. Strong keywords that serve as anchor text are crucial for all posts. These keywords have to appear in the title of the social media post. The post could contain a video or a link to a blog post.

Social sharing has a cumulatively healthy effect on your domain. Google will notice extent and frequency of sharing and pass on the resulting benefits to your site. Threads that generate replies do well. Engage with your audience, stoke replies.

Ask people to share your posts. You should not do this with every post, but every once in a while when you come up with a great post, then reach out to your friends, especially the opinion influencers, and ask them to share the post you’re putting up.

Social media can also help you accumulate authority on a local level. Local SEO is a great tool to target customers and on sites like Facebook and Twitter, you should craft a strategy to develop a local following by creating a page targeted at a local audience. Engage with the community offline, and spread the word online. Hold giveaway sessions, offer discounts, introduce an app and let them know about it…there’s a fair bit that you can do get the buzz going locally. Google will notice it and give your domain the necessary upward bump.