- July 16, 2014
- 0
- Email This Post
- Print This Post
Boosting Your SEO Profile with Social Media
Marketers are aligning their SEO strategies to maximize social media’s impact.
Social media is playing a vital role in SEO strategies going forward. Traditionally, SEO has focused on content, website architecture and linking. Although these areas are still critical, SEO marketers have become increasingly more focused on relevant content and relationships social media generates.
With the advent of Google’s search algorithm update Hummingbird, the old adage “content is king” is being applied to social media channels. Social media websites, such as Facebook and Twitter pages, are treated like any other pages, according to Google. Essentially, if something is posted on Twitter or Facebook, Google can crawl it and add it to the search results. For more on Hummingbird, fly over to read, “What Should Marketers Know about Google Hummingbird?”
This is even more important with Google’s own social networking website, Google+.
Google indexes all Google+ pages, meaning that by posting content on Google+, a marketer increases the chance for the content being found. Google cannot index other social media sites like Facebook and Twitter as completely as Google+ because Google doesn’t own the data from other sites. This means marketers should work to increase their influence and credibility on Google+ by leveraging authentic engagement and participating social discourse frequently. Additionally, while Google will not confirm it, many experts believe that Google+ shares have a direct impact on search results. CEO Larry Page calls it “the social spine” for all things Google.
If you don’t have an account, you can get one here and start passing along relevant links, text, audio and video. Doing so will quickly increase your online credibility by signaling Google that you take its “sharing is caring” mantra seriously. Being active in Google+ communities, helping answer queries, curating helpful content and producing fresh, original, in-depth content will also increase your Google reputation.
Social media can have a larger impact on the overall performance of SEO when social data are used to inform ongoing content marketing plans. Figuring out keywords and relevant content to share is invaluable to maximizing the relevant content Google and other search engines find important to boost rankings.
The size of your social empire is irrelevant, but a social presence is very relevant when it comes to search. Although, the larger your social footprint, the more impact social media will have on your SEO efforts.
The role of social media in SEO suggests that future search results may provide tighter integration with social results. It’s evident that the web has become an intensely social place.
As we move forward in the new SEO era of social, the takeaway is this: Stays active on your social networks. Pay attention to them, curate them, improve them, enhance them and remain plugged into this valuable resource.
