It’s safe to say that almost everybody is in social media. Whenever you meet someone new, you don’t ask him if he is on Facebook; it’s already a given. According to statistics, the average youth spends around 7.5 hours per week on social media which I personally think is a conservative estimate.
At the end of 2010, Google claimed that when it comes to ranking websites, one of their factors is social metrics. Social media actions, such as shares and tweets, contribute over 7 percent to your ranking. It was at 5 percent two years prior and you can see that its influence is steadily increasing.
What does this tell you? If you want social engines to take you seriously, you need a strong presence in Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and other social media staples. You also need to watch out for any new and promising social media apps so you can hitch your wagon to theirs. Remember that being shared, tweeted, tagged and reposted is a sure-fire way to be noticed by search engine optimization Factors that determine SEO rank:
These are the way you can use social media for SEO: SEO Company Gold Coast
1. Create a Blog
What is it? – You don’t need to be opinionated or love yourself too much in order to create a blog; you don’t even have to talk about your personal life. You can make it like a news site of your own where you can post about news that interest you and engage your followers to talk about them. A blog need not be formal; in fact, you can give it your personal touch by speaking the way you would in person devoid of high-fallutin words and academic grammar.
Blog for Business – If you are a business owner, you can talk about the latest happenings in your industry and your opinion about it. You can also address the questions your audience may have. Who knows? You might be able to impress them enough to drive traffic to your site.
Blog and SEO – Blogs are effective for SEO purposes. The more you update your blog, the more its page count goes up. Google gives websites that have more pages a higher ranking that those with less pages.
Where to blog? – You can keep your blog within your primary website (website.com/blog), make it a subdomain (blog.website.com) or a whole new URL (yourblog.com). For SEO purposes, your goal should be increasing the number of pages in your website, therefore, your blog should be in your primary website. Every content you add to your blog will count as pages in your website thereby increasing its ranking. You may use a subdomain or another URL if you want a stand-alone blog that will have its own rank.
Struggling for content ideas” Go to your FAQ page on your website and transform each question into a blog topic. In fact, an organisation’s FAQ page will often attract more traffic than the the organisation’s homepage. This is simply because the questions on an FAQ page naturally reflect what people are usually looking for.
2. Include Share Buttons in your Blog
Have faith in your self. Believe that your readers will love your content enough that they will share it with their friends. Make sure you have share buttons in your blog to make sharing easy. Of course your readers can copy and paste but why give them a hard time, right? The most shared blogs today are Buzzfeed, Huffington Post and Daily Beast. They have become popular because their readers keep on sharing them. Remember though that sharing is different from Likes. Facebook Shares will increase your ranking because Google wants people to engage with your content.
3. Create a YouTube channel
YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world and you cannot ignore its power as a social media tool. The most popular content in YouTube are the how-to videos. Apparently, people are no longer satisfied with just the end product, they want to know how these products came to be. Sharing your knowledge through YouTube is a sure-fire way to build trust and establish expertise. When you upload your video in YouTube, make sure to fill up all the information field including the category and tags. Tags work like keywords in SEO; they make your video findable in YouTube.
4. Embed YouTube videos in your blog
Your blog can be highly engaging and shareable when it has video content. Embed your Youtube videos and hope that your readers will share them. Go a step further by inviting non-competitive websites to embed your videos. When they do so, your YouTube ranking goes up. Make sure to introduce your videos using keywords and that there are social media share buttons in place.
5. Share your content on social media
Posts that are just lines of texts don’t have as much likes as those that have a video or photo. When you write a post in Facebook, include a video, a short intro text and then a link to your blog post. Make sure to post regularly to maintain a social media presence. Check your social media stats to assess your content and SEO efforts. Once you know which content is popular, you will have an idea what other content you should come up with.
6. Share your content through influencers
Increase your reach by going beyond your audience. Reach out to social media influencers and ask them to share your content with their audience. Social media influences are like the celebrity bloggers of social media. Getting them to share your content is like having their endorsement and this will do wonders to your credibility.
7. Look beyond the obvious
Social media is not limited to Facebook and Twitter. Pinterest is a good social media platform. It is highly visual and the images can be make clickable to the actual products in the website. If you are an e-commerce store, be sure not to ignore Pinterest. Another platform that you should not ignore is Google+. Google is the number one search engine and it owns YouTube, the number two. It goes without saying that an active Google+ account will do good for your ranking. Get In contact with the SEO Experts!
