The future of SEO and search result dominance belongs to brands that have understood and know how to leverage the power of social media networks. Search engines are leaning more towards social signals as important ranking factors, particularly with regard to website/brand authority.
Given this fact, an SEO expert worth his salt should be making every effort to improve their SEO strategy, leveraging all opportunities presented by social media to improve search dominance and cultivate brand awareness, with huge payoffs to be realized further down the tunnel. Below are a few more ideas to help you get started.
- Cultivate engagement for links
Meaningful engagement encourages social sharing, and with more shares, you’re more likely to get linked to naturally. Brands that are not working at developing meaningful engagement on social media will see much fewer shares and links by extension.
Social media provides a resourceful avenue to win high-authority links to your website’s content. If you build an engaged community, you will not only receive shares on your audience’s social profiles; but you will also be featured in their websites, blogs and articles. Such links will endear you to search engines, improving your rankings significantly.
- The power of influence
In addition to building meaningful relationships with your audience, cultivating strong ties with important influencers within your niche is made much easier in this era of social networking. This works not only to develop your social media interactions, it also has a significant effect on SEO.
People who have an audience that follows them will win you some publicity and much-needed extra traffic each time your brand/business is mentioned or featured. In addition, any links coming from their website increases your appeal to search engines.
- Link consistency
It’s not uncommon for your audience to use URLs found on social media for linking, therefore ensure that your URLS are canonical and SEO-friendly. Having the right URL will make it easier for people to use when linking from other places. Ensure that your URLs are visible in cover images, bios as well as other images so that the links are accessible for anyone who may want to link to your site at any point in future.
