Search engine optimization used to be all about keywords, meta-tags and content creation. Over time sites have become more diverse. Quality components have gained ground creating the need for more sophisticated strategies. Today the entire SEO strategy is undergoing one of the most important changes in years; the inclusion of social media rankings or social “signals” as a key indication of search relevancy.
But lets get into more details about how important Social Media is to SEO:
- Get direct links: You can get backlinks by adding your site link to your profiles on Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Most social media sites will include a “nofollow” tag on any outbound links but they are still links from external domains driving traffic to your website.
- SERP Domination: Means to fill up the search engine top results with domains that are under your control. Social media channels like Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc., have a high domain authority and rank very high in the SERPs, will help you to potentially fill up these results.
- Builds Brand Awareness: This is critical if you want to enhance your SEO authority. Social media can be used to share articles, press releases, videos, and other content. The more you share, the faster your brand builds and you become more visible. As long as you continue to produce quality content, you will soon become an authority in your niche.
- Source of content: Social media profiles can be a source of content for your site, both directly and indirectly via inspiration. This means that social profiles can help you build the content that you need on your site to perform well in the engines.
Now the question is, how should I extend my keywords map to the social media channels?
Using keywords on social media channels is very similar to using keywords on business websites. You can extend your keywords analysis into your social media channels in a few different ways:
- Make sure you have your brand name and/or your keywords in your profile’s shortcode or URL.
- Place keyword-rich descriptive text in the “summary” and “about” sections of all your accounts.
- Include the keyword in your headlines. Headlines are on-page drivers for SEO, so you can bet that search engines will be indexing important headline content often.
- Fill in captions of photos with keywords and use tags with keywords whenever possible.
- If you are going to update a status on your Facebook, Google+, Linkedin or Twitter account, try and use your keywords as much as possible.
- Use your keywords in your messaging any way you can….without being spammy of course.
- When you can you should always add keyword rich anchor text for your links instead of just the URL in your social media accounts.
Conclusions:
To get the top positions in the Social Network Search Result Page is much easier than trying to get to the top of a search engine result page. Since this media is pretty new and users have not yet exploited it till the point of saturation, like has happened with search engines. Additionally, the major search engines have incorporated new features with the idea of integrating social media into their search results. That makes this field quite attractive for companies as a way to position their brands quickly due to the impact of the social media channels in SERP.
