Just as the world of SEO has rapidly evolved in function and process in recent years, so has its scope. We’re no longer looking at specifically defined tasks that can be narrowly performed in order to raise up your page as you need it. The game has now changed and social media is a big part of that. Enter social media SEO.
You’re looking now at a landscape where popular social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr are important aspects in managing your work and ensuring your success. A downside to this is the need to spread your efforts wider than before. The other side of this coin however is that there is much more opportunity for innovation – know the general rules and you can do social media SEO your own way.
So let’s take a look at a few examples.
Each of these has benefits for you but we recommend picking a few that seem the most relevant and steadily testing and incorporating them into your existing SEO plan. Social media SEO can be fickle and it’s a risk to your work and business to disrupt your approach to working too much at once. It could also make reporting on just how much you’ve benefited more difficult.
Embed Keywords into Our Social Network Profiles
While a simple tip, this one is low effort and can enhance your campaigns easily.
Best used as part of a cohesive plan that involves good social media users already, it’s as simple as keeping your keywords consistent across your chosen platforms to give more opportunity for your pages to be visible and rise in rank following engagement.
Your Posts and Updates Need to Be Public and Shareable
This simple setting will help maximize your engagement. While there isn’t too much to this tip, it’s a very common mistake to see a budding social media page held back by forgetting to turn off any sharing restrictions to the public.
Make Full Use of Google+ Pages
You can take advantage of the search results page on Google by ensuring you have the Google+ page fully set up and branded accordingly.
It can often be the case that while your other social media or website pages might be towards the bottom of the page for the business you are working on, the Google+ page can be listed right at the top.
Try searching for an established brand like Coca-Cola and you’ll see that there is a Wikipedia-style summary that includes a blurb and details such as the company logo, stock prices and important dates.
Updating your Google+ page to also include details with a full address and contact information can help customers locate your physical location. This is a point that might be more relevant to some situations than others, but for the time spent entering that information, you could see some local check-ins crop up.
That’s a huge potential value for earned income in exchange for keeping that information updated.
Have Your Facebook Page Vanity URLs Ready
Once your Facebook page hits 25 likes you have the option of creating a custom URL. This is of course an easy number to hit and you need to be prepared with the right URL right away once this is available. Adding this to your checklist for managing your social media pages won’t take too much time and will help your results.
The one point to keep in mind here is for you to keep the URL brand consistent and not too generic. If you have too much in the URL or it contains words that aren’t specific enough Facebook won’t like this and you’ll lose the benefits available to you. You can also lose out on the fan side if it’s particularly cheesy or generic.
Use Backlinks on the Pages You Have Already Created
As you may know, a large part of current SEO is how “authoritative” your page is considered by Google.
This is all about the quality and number of references and links shooting back and forth and a great way to stay on top of this is to maximize the inbound links to your page.
It’s as simple as putting a link to your site in areas like your Twitter profile or in blog posts.
Make Sure Your Social Media Pages Are Recognizable When Searched For
It’s surprising to this day how many people involved in SEO limit themselves to the concept of Google or Bing search.
It’s increasingly common for customers to search now using built-in search tools on sites like Facebook and Twitter. This has a good and bad side.
The good news is that your competition is often lower. You aren’t up against the whole of Google when somebody searches for something relevant to you specifically.
The bad news is that if your page isn’t recognizable enough it can actually be a struggle to confirm which is which. You need to make sure that your titles and logos or pictures are consistent and clear. This will help searches to do with your product or business land more often.
Encouraging Link Sharing
Perhaps an obvious choice, this still bears pointing out due to the potential to see your social media sides build rapidly.
There are a few main ways you can work on increasing the share rate of your content.
A popular method is an interactive survey. You can use different surveying tools or the inbuilt Facebook tool for this. If you want to work in prize drawings however you might need to go external. This is a great method for building a high level of genuine interaction between your page and its followers.
This also has the benefit of being very self-perpetuating. The more you work on building the share-rate of your pages the more people they are exposed to. So long as your content is genuine and not filled with spam, you’ll be good to go.
Keep in mind people can be selective online – just be sure that you aren’t appearing insincere when working on this area of your page. Turning people away through poorly gauged actions like these can have a particularly negative response instead of the positive you need.
In Conclusion
You can see that some of these links are quite common sense. Working on social media SEO doesn’t have to be too much work.
The key is consistency.
Making sure in advance that your plans to roll out your work to a new platform are well set will save you a lot of work and headaches down the line. While it might not be overnight, so long as you keep your branding consistent and unique and your engagement genuine you’ll see success.
As mentioned briefly above it’s also good to review in advance what numbers you hope to get out of social media. It can be a murky world when it comes to statistics and if you’re investing more time into this channel your return on investment on time spent needs to be clear.
Put these points together and you’ll be set for success in the world of social media SEO.