Increasing Your SEO With Social Media

in SEO

Friends encourage their friends to digest specific content. If you can appeal to a given person, their friends are statistically more likely to be interested in the same thing, so you’re likely reaching a well-targeted audience. – Social Media Optimization

Blogging as a Search Engine Magnet

According to HubSpot, websites with blogs receive 55% more traffic than sites without. Blogging is a great way to increase your search engine visibility. By providing quality content, you’ll increase the likeliness of your audience spreading your words across their communities.

SMO strategy means appealing to the audience, not an intermediary (i.e. search engine); knowing what drives interest; and activating people’s desire to consume and share. – SEO is dead and the new king is SMO

Having a relevant business blog on your website has many advantages for your search engine visibility and ranking, such as:

  • Bringing you repeat visitors and encouraging the spread of your content.
  • Keeping your website full of fresh content.
  • Giving you more opportunities to fill your site with your targeted keywords.
  • Creating content in a more easily readable way for search engines to track and index, making your site indexed quicker and helping you rank higher faster.
  • Building your community and showing the search engines who else you associate with online. The inbound and outbound links that you’ll build with a blog show the search engines that you can be trusted and are an authority in your niche.
  • Show off your customers! Highlight an article about the successes of one of your clients and feature it on your website. The client will be sure to send out the link to everyone they know and you’ll be showing off that you can bring success to a someone who hires you.

Increasing your Findability

SEO is all about bringing people into your website and social media can play a very strong roll in aiding this effort.

More than half of marketers indicated a rise in search engine rankings was a benefit of social media marketing. As search engine rankings improve, so will business exposure, lead generation efforts and a reduction in overall marketing expenses.  – Social Media Examiner 2010 Industry Report

Reputation Management

Social media sites often rank high on search engine results, so owning your profile will get your profile from these major social media sites on the first page much quicker. You need to own the first page of Google for your keywords to dominate your market and this is another way to do that.

Build Back Links

Spreading your content via social media will in turn cause the spread of links to your site across the Internet, assuming you’re distributing quality content,  which I know you are. These back links are a great plus for your site because they aren’t bought or traded for and come naturally from people genuinely interested in the information that you’re offering.

Social media tools can also be used on-site to encourage sharing your content. Tools such as Digg, Retweet or Facebook Like buttons, for example. This encouraged sharing will extend your reach into the social communities of your customers and bring in additional visitors for your site.

Dominate Search Results

Social results also appear for Google search results. Aside from a direct result on search engine rankings for your site, it still improves search engine visibility for your company. Google Search melds the Google Web, Image, Video, News, Blog as well as other search results into one page of relevant information. This also includes Google Places (Maps) and business reviews/ratings. It’s important to own these profiles as well so you can direct people to your site or have them execute a call to action.

The Unconventional Search Engine

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. So of course there is Google, Yahoo! and Bing, but what about the other more unconventional search engines? There’s actually two that get more searches than Yahoo! or Bing. What are they? Twitter and YouTube. You may not think of them as your typical search engines, but they are search engines none the less. People go to them searching for information that they want. Increasing your findability includes enhancing your business to be found on these sites as well as on Google or the other major search engines.

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