Why and How to use Social Media SEO
Did you know that social media is a great way to gain more SEO traffic? Do a simple search in Google, and more than likely, a social media profile will show up. You’ll see bands with the same name as the search you’ve done shows up, and YouTube videos that have been optimized come up in searches too. So, how can you leverage your social media accounts to boost your SEO?
Why Social Media Is Important in Today’s SEO
According to Google’s Eric Schmidt, one of the ranking signals for Google search is social media activity. As Google confirms the use of social media tracking in SEO rankings, the role of social media in SEO has greatly increased, and integrating social media ratings in the new algorithm has become significant.
Google’s search algorithm now gives importance to social media activity. It constantly searches for external validation of a website and its contents from people liking and sharing content on social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and of course, Google+. Interestingly, sharing a URL on Google+ gets it quickly crawled and indexed. Moreover, users can now see “personal results” from people within a certain social network.
How to Use Social Media for SEO
Create Quality, Share-Worthy Content
Google constantly strives to weed out useless websites that offer only junk content. SEO these days is about quality content once again. When you produce high quality, useful content that piques people’s interest, there’s a good chance that it will get shared and distributed to various readers via social media. Google will then know that your content is worthy of ranking highly in search results, and you’ll earn the social rankings boost. As your content gets read by more users, you’ll be acquiring natural links from the content’s visibility and value. In effect, you’ll get more social followers, amplify your network reach, and ultimately amass more searchers who’ll be inclined to see your content.
What Kind of Content Should You Publish?
Most likely, your customers and prospects will appreciate resources that will give them useful information or help them solve a problem. You could share insightful articles, videos, or free downloads that disclose valuable tips and tricks that a credible industry expert can offer.
Generate Great Content Ideas Through Social Networks
To produce top quality content that your audience will be compelled to share, try finding ideas on social networking sites. You could uncover great ideas from your readers themselves. Go through their posts, and find out what they want to know. You could sift through news feeds, retweets, or enter a series of prompts in Twitter’s search bar to unveil topics that your customers are interested about.
Build Natural Backlinks Via Social Media
Considering that Google and Bing both confirmed that they publicly track shared links on Twitter and Facebook, these social networking sites are great spots to build natural backlinks to your site. You should build your networks on these social media sites, and connect your blog to your social media accounts. Then, you can make repeated announcements of new content to reach active users by using an update-scheduling tool. Don’t forget to set up your Google+ page, as it greatly helps strengthen your SEO efforts.
Social media is clearly an integral part in today’s SEO, and any marketer shouldn’t ignore its importance any longer. By giving importance to social media in your SEO, and continuing to focus on your authority as an industry expert, there’s a higher chance that you’ll successfully increase your search engine rankings.
About Author: Erik Gaandt is a freelance tech writer and SEO enthusiast. He enjoys sharing his insights on various blogs. More than 90% of webmasters read reviews when deciding on webhost. Who Is Hosting This is home to hundreds of reviews on the most popular webhosts such as iPage.com.