Over the past few years we have noticed the evolution of social media sites and their impact on SERP ranking. Nowadays, if you search for any famous brand, for example, Coca Cola or Reebok, then links from Facebook, Twitter and other major social media sites will surely pop up in the top 10 results. Search engines have realized the potential of social media sites and hence give importance to social signals such as “like”, “share”, “retweet”, “+1”, “pin” etc.
The time has come to merge search engine optimization with social media activities to get noticed by the search engines. Social media can improve organic search results for the relevant keywords significantly. If you are a newcomer in the SEO industry, then read the guidelines mentioned below to leverage social media for search engine optimization.
Social link building:
Prior to the Penguin algorithm update, only the number of backlinks mattered, not their authority or quality. But now, quality of links is far more important than the number of backlinks. Social media sites can help you acquire quality backlinks without spending a penny. Links from social media sites are considered high quality because the PageRank of Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other such sites is always very high. Therefore, you should open an account on all the social media sites and provide a link to your website in the profile/page description part. Besides, you can always post relevant content, your blog post links and interesting videos embedded in your site to bring organic traffic.
Boost follower base to increase authority: You can start following the leaders in your industry and share/retweet their blog posts or articles. For example, if you run an online apparel store, following and retweeting the top fashion designers in your city can benefit your business. First of all, new customers will start following your fan page and profile because you have famous personalities in your friend/follower list and secondly, when these famous people will see that you are interested in their work and appreciate them, then they will do the same. Don’t you think that an apparel store will benefit if someone like Sabyasachi or Ritu Kumar praise it on social media and share the web URL on their page?
Hashtags are your best friends: If search engine optimization is based on keywords, then the same role is played by hashtags in social media. Hashtags make a topic trending and help people filter the millions of posts in social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Hence, use hashtag in your posts to help people find the content you share on social media sites. For example, if you are offering a Christmas Sale and want to lure maximum number of customers, you can post something like this- “#Christmassale get up to 50% discount on a wide range of products.”
Use keywords intelligently: Just like you use keywords in your website and blog posts, social media posts should feature keywords as well. This way, your social media content can be tracked by the search engines and when people will search for those keywords, search engine result pages will show the social media content.
You can also take advantage of local listing facility provided by Google+ to inform Google about your business details. Once Google knows your office/store location, phone number and website details, your website will appear in local results when people will search for the keywords relevant to your business.
