Facebook And Twitter Tips To Benefit SEO

Social media marketing is an intensely fast-paced environment, and in order to be effective agencies and brands must continuously ask themselves how return on investment and success can be measured.

For different brands and businesses, the hallmarks of success are more signups, business and subscribers; but there is no doubt that drawing traffic to your website is a basic component of how social media can contribute to the success of any focused digital marketing campaign.

In drawing traffic to your site, you need to consider perhaps the most powerful influence on how many visitors you attract: the search engines, mainly Google.

The Correlation Between Social Media and SEO
Social media drives SEO, and being active on quality user generated websites will positively impact organic search rankings.

According to BrightEdge data, 75-90% of the top 10 results for a SERP will have been tweeted, Liked, plus one’d, shared, followed, favorited, bookmarked, pinned, or stumbled at least once.

In certain industries, such as finance and retail, the level of influence is even greater. This means that Facebook, Linkedin, Pinterest and Twitter are very important tools for improving your market position. So how can you use them to drive traffic?

Integrate social media into your website at every level. On your high quality content pages and product listings, invite your audience to connect, follow, like, share or retweet your company’s offerings and your product pages. It is important to have a consistent and compelling stream of content that is relevant to users and helps them solve their problems.

Facebook 
Facebook is the 900 pound gorilla of the social media world, and can powerfully influence search engine rankings on both Google and Bing.

To optimize your rankings, you should provide regular updates on Facebook: your Facebook page is only as good as the content that you showcase and the media that your customers can interact with.

More interactive and visual digital assets such as photos and videos will keep visitors coming back and engage them longer. Regular updates (minimum once per day) are essential, and you should consistently encourage visitors to participate by responding to their comments.

Facebook Shares are the single most powerful way to increase the search engine ranking of your page through social media. Choose a strong name for your page – Your username will affect your position, so choose a clean business page URL that accurately describes your website.

Use you’re ‘About’ box to write keyword-rich copy that the search engines will pick up.

Facebook offers social plugins that you can integrate into your site design, including a ‘Like’ ‘Share’ and ‘Send’ buttons, custom Comments feature and an Activity feed plugin, which will show your visitors what their friends are doing on your website, and create a sense of customer community and engagement.

Twitter
Twitter is equally vital to search engine rankings, so ensure that your webpage displays your company’s Twitter feed.

Social and realtime search results are heavily affected by buzz on Twitter. The weight of a tweeted link will depend on how often it is posted, how many tweets and retweets it attracts, and the Author Rank of those who post it.

Buzz on Twitter particularly affects news-related results on search engines, so it is worth prioritizing Twitter over Facebook for event-related SEO. Make use of the Twitter plugins available to install your Twitter feed on your website, especially on your most frequently updated sections.

Choose a strong username, and insert links and keywords into your Twitter profile.

When tweeting, remember that it is the first 40 characters of a Twitter update that will appear as the title of a search engine ranking result, so this is the place to include relevant keywords to define your message’s content.

Tweets should include links: link to your YouTube page, Facebook page, new blog post or special content page to build up the connectedness of your site and increase its position in the social graph.

Use multiple forms of social media engagement to your website, as different industries have different tastes and unique ways of consuming information.

This guest post was produced by Singlegrain and heavily edited by the folks at Netpaths.