December 13, 2012

Increasing your SEO rankings with social media

December 13, 2012

Increasing your SEO rankings with social media

Increasing your SEO rankings with social media

We all love social media – its engaging, creates a two way conversation with you and your clients, allows you to share in a real time environment…. But did you also know that search engines love a social media link?Author reputation, bookmarking, commenting, as well as a number of other social factors (Likes, tweets, retweets, shares, etc.) are considered a major factor in Google ranks websites and blogs in its algorithm.So how does this all work? Forget link building – think relationship building. Distributing your valuable content from your website and blog via your social media outlets (LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter) will be of value to readers. The reader then shares, comments or retweets your content, and this is considered a “social share” in the eyes of Google, adding to the link building profile.So, how does an average small business get started on creating valuable links to your website?

  1. Get social: Set up a YouTube account, Facebook account, LinkedIn company page, Twitter account and Google+. Ensure that you use the description to identify a number of your key keywords. Where possible, add a link back to you website.
  2. Get strategising: Now you have your pages ready to go, think about a strategy that would grow your liker/followers and drive engagement. Always think about the value proposition – what would people find interesting? What would make them comment, share and retweet? For YouTube, this might be posting instructional or informational video content about your products and services. For LinkedIn, this may be a whitepaper or an industry report. For Facebook, Twitter and Google+, an industry related article which you have posted on your website or blog and shared. Form your strategy for each activity, and use it to guide you.
  3. Get blogging or linking: Create valuable content on your website that you can share and RSS feed through to your various social media pages. When talking face to face with your customers, if common questions occur, then write a news article or blog about it. Chances are it’s of interest to others.
  4. Get active: Social media takes consistency, hard work and monitoring. Set aside the time to review your social media and watch the trends. Use all the tools available (e.g. Facebook Insights, LinkedIn Analytics, YouTube Analytics). Test, measure, and test again. You will start to see a trend on what works and what doesn’t. Do more of what gets interaction, and less of what doesn’t. Simple.

In short, applying the same principles to a solid social media strategy will also help you with your Google rankings. It’s that simple.Talk to the team at Bang Online about how to get your social media and link building strategy off the ground.