Social Media and Your SEO Strategy

Social media has come a long way. Aside from enabling people to connect, it has also grown to become a preferred method of searching for information online. This means that SEO and social media strategies are invariably linked together. Part of your SEO strategy is to strengthen your social media presence. You see, a high level of social media engagement will also have a considerable impact on your SEO efforts.

Here are some things you can do in the realm of social media that will impact the effects of your SEO strategy:

• Go social. That is, create accounts in all major social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Do not wait until someone hijacks your company name. By opening social networking accounts under your own company name, you have control of the profile and content. When opening an account, ensure that your business details (company name, business category and subcategories, address, website address, contact numbers and opening hours) are accurate. You should also carefully use targeted keywords in your profile description to increase ranking potential. In addition, assign someone in your company to handle the social media accounts to ensure that there are regular posts.
• Social media pages add weight to your search results. Google and other major search engines index a company’s social media pages. This helps push up your presence in the first pages of the search results.
• Work to get followers. Google and other search engines also take a look at the quality of followers in your social media accounts. It is not simply creating a lot of fake accounts to be your followers. Search engines can see through this and may even penalize you. Building your followers through organic means is the way to go. First, encourage employees to follow your social media accounts and be actively involved in sharing, commenting and liking. Second, build a following by offering contests and offers for followers and top commenters. The more activity (i.e. likes and shares) your social media account has, the higher your rankings.
• Encourage shares. Readers will be inclined to share when your content is interesting, informative, funny or emotionally uplifting. You can provide tutorials and infographics of issues of interest to your readers. In your website and blog, make it easy for readers to share your posts by placing share buttons in conspicuous areas in the page. This will increase the search result rankings for a specific blog post as Google may count the post more valuable because of the number of shares, links and comments.
• Social links provide more value that artificial ones. Fabricating backlinks to your website in an effort to improve SEO results may even be bad for your website. Search engines have sophisticated algorithms that recognize whether the sources of the links are legitimate. In addition, social links are authentic links – someone with a social media account liked and shared your post. In turn, his friends and followers were able to see the link and can easily check it out. There is a higher potential of driving real traffic to the website.
• Raise credibility and authority through Google+. Link your posts with your company’s Google+ account by tagging it as the author of your content. This strengthens your credibility as an expert of the content you provide.
• Adds weight to your local search results. Your customers will search for your products and services and expect local search results. Imagine if you are a restaurant and during lunch time, someone searches for a place to eat in your area, if you are able to get at the top local search results, you increase the likelihood that customers get to your restaurant through this method. Just be sure that your address and information are always kept updated.

About Adaptivity Pro

Trust your Utah SEO efforts to the experts. Adaptivity Pro has been providing companies with creative, out-of-the-box social media and SEO solutions. We also offer a wide range of internet-based services such as Utah web design, internet marketing and e-commerce services. Let our crack team of writers, web designers, programmers and SEO specialists take your website and internet presence to the next level!