It is a known fact that social media is one of the elements that Google refers to when ranking websites. The extent of how much it is referred to is unknown; however your social media cannot be ruled out or ignored as it makes up one of the key ingredients for ranking websites on SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages)
Below are some guidelines that will help you improve your SEO via social media and content strategy.
- Add your keywords to your social media updates and posts
It is important to remember the effectiveness of a social media post, is based on its impact on the social platform in question, and it’ search engine friendliness. Keywords are an element to incorporate into your posts if you want Google to recognise what your post or link is about when they are indexing your pages.
- Add long posts (now and again)
A lot of pages use cheap tricks such as stealing photos from another page in order to attract engagement and attention, and Google is now wise to this. If you incorporate a long post now and again, Google will recognise your page as a resource of information, rather than a place to view images. Alternatively, if you constantly post long updates, this can bore your audience and Google may recognise this as a tactic to fool the search engine. Facebook and Google + provide the best platform for long posts whilst for the likes of Twitter or You Tube, long posts are not a good idea. Remember to choose your platform carefully if you decide to adopt this tactic.
- Improve link descriptions
Have you ever been on Facebook and twitter in the past, and have been presented with a link and an image on your news feed and had no idea what it was all about? Well Google will think the same too. If you choose to link a post to content shown on your site or another site, remember to describe what the link is about so Google is able to identify and index it correctly.
- Post topics that are going to appeal to your target audience/market
There are lots of social media marketers that post funny content or pictures that have done the rounds. They are usually quite successful in getting more likes and shares; however they fail to recruit an engaged audience and conversion numbers are low. Enjoying your posts is good, but attracting clicks through to your website is a fundamental aim you must work on. If you attract people that are interested in what you offer and your website, then they are more likely to pay your site a visit which will help improve your search engine ranking.
In summary, if you create content on social media which relevant to what you do and your target market enjoys your content so much to inspire them to visit your website, you will achieve better results on the search engines.
