7 Tips to Improve Your SEO With Social Media

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Social Media is becoming an increasing tool not only to increase only presence and PR, but also in improving SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). In other words, posting on social media sites such as Facebook, Google + and Twitter can improve your Google rankings.

Since the Google Panda and Penguin updates, we have seen many companies drop off the google rankings due to their ‘unethical’ linking strategies. Now is the time to increase your google ranking with quality content and social media.

But how do you improve your SEO with Social Media?

1. Influence Social Sharing

Social shares contribute to SEO these days, social shares hold SEO weight. It’s great to have 2 or 3 Facebook or Twitter shares, but even better if you can get 100s or 1000s.

The key to influencing social sharing is quality posts and content. Strong blog posts on current issues work extremely well. You can also influence social sharing but creating contests and asking people to ‘like’ or ‘RT if….’

Image tagging is also a powerful way to influence social sharing. Remember that you cannot tag someone on Facebook from a business page. However, what you can do is access that picture from your personal profile and search from there.

2. Increase Brand Awareness

A strong social media presence that raises brand awareness through social media engagement will increase your authority.

Make your brand presence clear with a uniform logo across all accounts so that you ensure brand cohesion.

Then, it’s all about giving users a quality experience. That means sharing useful and engaging information through a variety of forms – images, videos, links, quizzes. It also means directly engaging with users through Direct Mentions and messages, possibly for excellent customer service if appropriate.

3. Increase your Followers

Followers and fans say a great deal about your company’s online presence. As a general rule on Twitter, you want the ratio of following: followers to at least be 1:1. If you have a dramatically higher number of followers than people who you follow, this shows that your brand is extremely influential online. What you don’t want to do is over-follow – it makes you look desperate and you are likely to be blocked for this if you do it to a great extent.

A great way to increase your followers is to engage in Twitter chats. There are many online Twitter chats on specific topics such as travel (#ttot) or health and wellness. Simply search for the Twitter chat hashtag online, find out when the chat starts and then jump in o n it with the hashtag. Twitter chats usually ask a series of questions Q1, Q2, Q3 and you respond using A1, A2 and A3. Every time I have engaged in Twitter chats, my following has increased dramatically.

One thing is for sure, avoid buying followers or likes. It could be evident as you may have robots following you, incomplete profiles, or appear to have a large following but no engagement. This can often do more harm than good. Jason DeMurs points out that Google can detect the quality of your followers, so you have to grow them organically for it to have an impact on SEO (www.forbes.com). That means quality content and engagement are essential.

4. Encourage Backlinks

Genuine backlinks will help to improve the authority of your site on Google. In other words, every time someone posts a link to your website on their site or blog, this can have a positive impact on your SEO. Social Media encourages backlinks by broadcasting your information to people who will find it useful and relevant. This means that you must be writing high quality blog posts and sharing them in different ways.

There are several things that you can do to encourage more backlinks through promoting content on social media. Firstly, post blog content at lest 3 times in different ways over the first 24 hours of publication. You might phrase one as a ‘New #blog post’, another as a question and another as a statement. Different ways of phrasing things can grab readers attention.

Secondly, using hashtags will make your tweets and posts more searchable, which in return gets your content out to more people who may give you a backlink. For example, instead of writing about ‘social media tips’ I might write about ‘#socialmedia tips’ – the second tweet or post would be more findable on social media because it uses a relevant #hashtag.

5. Optimise your Bio or Profile

Another SEO advantage of social media is that many social sites have a high domain authority and ranking potential. Therefore, many of the pages on these sites – including profiles – are likely to rank for targeted keywords, which creates multiple search listings for a brand (www.acronym.com). This means that your Facebook profiles, Twitter Bios and Google Story need to be up to date and include keywords and relevant hashtags where possible.

6. Don’t Underestimate the Power of Google +

Many social media marketers overlook Google Plus because it is not seen to be as popular as Twitter and Facebook. However, miss out, and you could be making a big mistake!

According to research from Searchmetrics, social signals account for seven out of the top eight factors correlated with Google search results, but Google +1s take the top spot.

In fact, Google +1s have the single highest correlation with Google search ranking (0.4), higher than than the number of Facebook shares (0.34), number of backlinks (0.34), and total Facebook Likes, Shares, and Comments (0.34) (www.trackmaven.com)

7. Social Media Posts bring Direct Traffic

Direct Traffic can come from social media link posting, which may result in a large increase in indirect links. This means that it is important to share your new and old blog posts. If you want to try a plugin that makes blog social sharing easier, I recommend ‘Revive Old Post’.

Social media sites themselves don’t provide much link value, but many publishers and webmasters look to social media sites for references, which results in valuable editorial links that help improve rankings.

If you enjoyed this article you might also like to read about White Label SEO

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