Social media is h
aving a growing influence on search engine and marketers who have integrated social media in their SEO strategies are already seeing the benefits. Social media generates reams of online content, and search engines are indexing more and more of it. But this explosion of content poses a challenge for search marketers: How do you optimize content that you only partially control? You must develop a strategy that takes advantage of the SEO benefits inherent in that social media content.
A solid social strategy comes first
It is important not to put the search cart in front of the social media horse. Developing a clear social media marketing strategy has to come first. Try to set-up your strategy so that you succeed no matter what the search engines decide to do. Setting up your brand on social networks and adding a blog to your website — they’re all tactics designed to better connect your brand with your audience. Your primary goals in these channels must be to provide great content, interact with your audience and build relationships.
Search engines are increasingly indexing social content
In addition to dynamic content, such as comments and updates, search engines are indexing and listing social media profiles in their results. Marketers with well designed, keyword optimized and updated profiles on networks such as Facebook and Twitter are finding those profiles listed for searches on their general brand names — giving them more ownership of the valuable first results page.
Social media builds inbound links
A key tenet of social media marketing is to provide value, often through great content and interaction. Audiences that receive good content will often link to it, and those links can dramatically improve a site’s natural search performance. Social media is powerful for link building is a critical part of search performance. Social media done right can generate a tremendous number of inbound links and social bookmarking sites . Information on social networks attracst more attention from audiences and generates inbound links when people grab the content and share it on their own blogs, websites and other locations.
Search and social data complement each other
Many of the tools used to monitor social media conversations are keyword driven. Search engine marketing is also keyword driven and the two channels can benefit from one another’s data. Your SEO keyword research can identify keywords and phrases to use in social media channels to attract more visitor traffic to that content and to help that content rank well.
On-site social media is a powerful content generator
Not all of your efforts should be focused on third-party channels like Facebook. Creating a blog or attracting an active community on your website can generate massive amounts of keyword-rich content for your domain.
Many marketers are already seeing the power of integrating their SEO and social media marketing strategies. They are using social media to: improving search rankings, increasing traffic from targeted keywords, expanding content shown in universal search results and generating more qualified leads.
Get social and get NOTICED!