Social Media and SEO

When most people start planning SEO for their website it has been invariably noticed that they often neglect the role of social media marketing. Social media marketing often lags further down the priority list behind SEO for a variety of reasons, mainly a lack of clarity as to what benefits it will actually bring and the fact that it's often difficult to relate a tweet or Facebook message to a return on investment whereas with SEO, for example, website owners can more easily attribute a growth in sales to new rankings for key-phrases.

However, the way social media marketing has evolved today only means that it now plays a much more important role in search engine optimization. Searches are now taking into account the reputation of websites as reflected in social media sites to determine the rank. Facebook Seeding for SEO is the principle behind using Facebook is to engage with, and build an army of fans who then recommend you to others which means more 'likes' and help for the SEO and the domain of the website. However it's not just that simple - to build a presence on Facebook and to attract fans takes ongoing work and management.

Social Sharing Sites like some online communities, such as Digg and StumbleUpon are dedicated to sharing content and can be very powerful ways of spreading a message about your brand and forming social media links that will directly help your SEO. Users can vote on the content and enough votes will result in being featured on the homepage. A link from one of these sites will reflect well on the SEO of your own. Again though, it's not enough to stick up any old content and hope for the best. Now you need to promote it, and this means work! Create suitable profiles, engage with users and don't be pushy.

The idea of running competitions isn't a new one, but conducting a competition using social media solely, is. The principle is basic - get users to follow your business on social media and in return they stand a chance to win something. Entering such a competition is easy for people - all they need to do is click 'follow' or 'like' and that's it. This is where website owners sometimes get confused. The whole idea behind social content seeding is attracting social signals rather than the traffic. Yes traffic will come to the site via social media sites, but it will not result in conversions.

Where the benefit comes is from the organic rankings, the place where people are already looking for you. The social signals will be helping your website attain better rankings and that's how the conversions are achieved. To learn how to effectively use and apply social media marketing along with your other SEO efforts, contact us at SEO Junkies.