Social media has taken the world by storm, and these sites are a great way to enhance your SEO marketing. Using these sources to build your customer base is far and away one of the easiest forms of driving traffic with a small amount of effort. Still, many people make common errors when trying to use social media to drive traffic.
The Good
To truly maximize the use of social media, it is important to be available on a number of networks. Initially, you will need to set up accounts with any social media sites that you find beneficial in reaching your target audience, such as Facebook, Twitter, or perhaps Google Plus. For niche businesses, there are other social networking sites worth looking into, and it may be worth your while to explore some smaller options. The fact that so many sites exist, even some niche sites, means that you can target your customers on the social network that they prefer without forcing them to conform to your choice of social site.
How are people maximizing social media to improve their search engine optimization results? Primarily, the most successful signal we have noticed from a search engine optimization perspective is the importance of “likes” on your content articles. Google’s algorithm places pages with more “likes” higher in the SERPs, making this a crucial step in using social media as part of search engine optimization. Additionally, “likes” tend to generate more “likes” and can be instrumental in building not only traffic but customers as well. Developing lots of social profiles, especially in niche categories, then promoting your content via “likes” is the key to having a social media presence we confidently classify as “the good.”
The Bad
Simply making social media accounts and leaving them dormant isn’t enough to have any real effect on SEO: you also need to post to them regularly and incorporate them into all communications that you put forward to both your new and your established customers. Building a conversation with your existing social media followers can help encourage them to contribute more comments and likes to your articles.
Spreading the word about your social presence is crucial, but too often overlooked. Start with banners on your site that link to your social network pages. Include links in your email correspondences. A lot of people decide that they’ve done enough once they’ve created their accounts and added a badge to their website: they are wrong. You need to promote your social profiles as a way to get interesting new information, discounts, new products, and cool stuff so that your fans have a reason to keep checking back for updates. Otherwise, your page will sit empty, lost in an endless sea of empty social media profiles. The failure to promote your social media presence and connect with your visitors won’t necessarily hurt you, but it won’t help you either: these are the “bad” techniques.
The Ugly
There are many ways to misuse social media, as well. One of the most common is spamming links to your products on people’s pages. Many with poor SEO skills also use programs and bots to add as many friends as they can to maximize the number of people they can lure into their site. These actions bring down your reputation, your business and your product and add little in terms of SEO. In fact, there’s strong evidence to support that sites that engage in these practices are being banned from Google’s index or penalized harshly, resulting in a drop in SERP. Since the positive upside is extremely limited but the potential downside risk is huge, we label these the “ugly” techniques – under no circumstances should you use them.
Posted by Greg Henderson, an Internet Marketer and SEO Associate for an email search and free public records site: MFES & RecordsProject. Please feel free to leave a comment or email him.
This is a unique article published on SEO Desk with exclusivity.
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