Since 1999
It is now clear that social media has an impact on search rankings. So how do you leverage social media to maximize your search rankings? Here are 7 simple strategies to do so:
1. Share Your Content Immediately on Social Media No doubt, you knew that sharing your content on social media is good for SEO because it makes your content visible immediately to your followers, prompting shares and likes that are helpful in bumping up your rankings. But did you know that tweeting your content actually helps your content get indexed faster, as shown by this SEOMoz experiment? This is a big plus if you are posting time sensitive material or ‘breaking news’ grade material. Quicker indexation means more visibility and increased traffic surge and eventually higher rankings.
2. Share Content the Right Way While sharing your content, make sure you accompany the link with an interesting/compelling excerpt that motivates the reader to click through and read your content. The increased traffic will contribute to SEO. Merely pasting the link will not get you any response. On the other hand, pasting the entire content on social media is of no help too. First of all, it is bad social media behavior and secondly you don’t receive any SEO benefits out of it.
3. Focus on Increasing Your Followers When you have more followers, there are greater opportunities for your content to get linked to and shared socially, which increases the chances of higher search rankings. Also, in considering social shares as social SEO signals, Google also considers shares on networks you are not part of. This means when someone in your social circle shares your content on a network you are not present on, it still contributes to your rankings. So by increasing your followers you are increasing the chances of visibility all across the online space and reaping corresponding SEO benefits. Use innovative techniques to increase your followers. Give away an ebook to your followers or offer them a free trial in exchange for following you.
4. Focus on Creating Shareable Content SEO value of social shares is not restricted to your followers alone. Even a non follower sharing your content contributes to SEO. So while focus on increasing followers is correct, you also have to focus on producing truly share worthy content that attracts maximum shares. In fact this is secret behind viral content that can give a tremendous boost to your rankings.
5. Pay Extra Attention to Google+ Google+ offers more SEO benefits than other social networks. With Google’s personalized search results, it is possible to dominate SERPs of large groups of people just because someone in their Google+ circles +1d your page. This is an SEO benefit you just cannot afford to ignore.
6. Verify Your Authorship with Google Verify your authorship to Google using the “Rel=author” and ”Rel=Me” tags. This helps Google confirm that you are indeed the author of the content. And Google will provide an author rich snippet along with a photograph next to your content in the search results. Like this. This not only helps build credibility, but also improves CTR due to the attention grabbing snippet. Of course, it is no rocket science that you need a Google+ profile to achieve all this. Refer here for details by Google on how to go about this.
7. Place Social Sharing Buttons Obviously on your Website Make it easy for your visitors to share your content. Placing social sharing buttons prominently on your site is important. Top placement may not work as people are unlikely to share before reading. Floating share bars, horizontal or vertical may work better. What social media strategies have you used for improving your search rankings? Note: This is a guest post by Canada’s top SEO consultant Yasir Khan. He is the founder of post Penguin link building company Quantum SEO Labs.
