Social media can play an important role in your search engine optimisation strategy. There are numerous ways of being social online, from using sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Pinterestto commenting in blogs and forums. As well as helping promote your business and engage with customers, these can also help you earn valuable links. Here are four tips to maximize the benefits:
1. Interact
Interaction is vital. You do not need to go overboard and dominate countless conversations, but you should interact on different social media early and do it often. If you are one of the first commenters on a post, you’re more likely to get noticed. Most readers are not going to read down to comment number 44 on a popular site, but almost everyone is likely to read the first few, including the author of the site.
However, there is no point in spamming countless forums and blogs with unrelated replies, or simple comments saying you liked the post with a smiley face emoji. You should aim to add value to the conversation through your comments. The value of your responses is going to be a lot more important that the frequency of your posts. The old cliché ‘quality not quantity’ definitely applies here.
At the same time, don’t make your comments too long; you might end up putting people off and they will skip reading what you have written. Yes, detail is important, but you are not writing a book – one succinct, relevant point is fine.
2. Really think about your content
You should aim to create and post content that will generate interest and attract your target reader’s attention. If you do not put in the effort, you will not reap the link rewards or possibly even a response. As before with your responses, you need to add value to the topics you are posting about. Your content should prompt people to put links to it across social media.
Being a little entertaining or creative will not go against you either. Do your research and have well-rounded, informative posts that are tailored for your audience and will attract the right sort of attention. Common styles include the popular list format, YouTube videos, various guides and tutorials. Originality will score you points too. Your subject does not have to be original but if the way you approach it is, it might appeal more to your reader.
You could also leave your readers wanting more on the subject. You can deliberately not go into heavy detail on every subject matter, so you will be asked questions that will keep the content live. You might choose to skim over one or two topics, with the aim of returning to them in a future post. This can work to your advantage, but it has to be done skilfully, and not as a “get out clause” for laziness.
3. Search for target links
To successfully build links, there are plenty of useful tools that can help you find people who are likely to link to you. You can use them to find people who are interested in your chosen topics, as well as leading influencers in your field. For example, Followerwonk, is a Twitter analytics tool that lets you break down and analyze data on your followers. Google’s site colon is another useful tool. It can be used to view particular aspects of a site; for example, bio pages. Fresh Web Explorer is another useful tool. In particular, it can be used to find blogs and check which content tends to get the most links.
4. Latent links
Through your social interactions; your likes, pins, shares, bookmarks, retweets and plus ones, you are earning latent links.It is believed by many that these latent links are what causes search engines like Google to have such a high association between social metrics and a high ranking.
Link building is still a very important part of SEO. Link building itself can be frustrating and time-intensive, but it is not something that should now be ignored; it still has a major say in the rankings.Since social links are seen as being more relevant to both the search engines and users, you should keep working hard to earn them and reap their benefits.Your social media presence can help you build links, increase the value of your site, and boost your all-important search engine rankings.