5 BEST Social Media Practices to Boost SEOblog.dlvrit.com /2015/03/boost-social-media-seo/

Debra Garber

The truth is, SEO is challenging and can be difficult for most small businessowners to understand. In addition to being extremely complicated, SEO bestpractices often change as Google continuously tweaks the rules of the game.However, in today’s digital world, your social media marketing strategies and SEOshould not be treated as two independent marketing silos – regardless of howcomplicated. They should be viewed as two tightly interwoven puzzle pieces inyour marketing plan. Pair them together like you would wine and cheese orstrawberries and cream or bread and butter (you get the drift). Both equallyimportant to enhance the other. The confusing part, if you ask ten differentpeople in online marketing whether social media impacts SEO, you’ll get tendifferent answers.

SEO is Challenging, Complicated and Confusing but VitallyImportant

Since social media relies on high-quality content and a visible,strong brand presence, the efforts you spend on SEO canseriously improve your social media reach, and as most searchmarketers will tell you, your social media presence can greatlyincrease your search rankings.

Here’s a list of five social media practices from Forbes that are shown toeffectively boost your SEO.

Practice #1: Organically grow your number of QUALITY fans andfollowers

Why is this important? A common misconception

The total number of followers and connections your social media profiles containdoes have a significant influence on your rankings. However, Google can detectthe quality of your followers, meaning buying 100,000 proxy Twitter followersisn’t going to do much for your overall rankings. Instead, you’ll need to build yourfollowing organically.

How to do this? (Hint: Through Content, Conversations andImmediate Response)

1. Create Compelling Content

Content keeps giving. When you provide content to your fans, they can help youextend its reach by sharing it with their followers. If the content is good, people willshare it frequently and your fan base can grow rapidly.

Examples of most shared content:

Something they like or recommend, such as products, services, movies,and books

News items

Links to websites

Reposts from other people’s social media posts

Video clips

2. Have a Conversation

Fans and followers want to engage with your brand. Reach out. Strike up aconversation. Remember this – happy fans retweet and share.

Examples of what to post:

Useful articles

Helpful tips

Open inquiries

General discussion items

Then, follow up with your users by directly engaging them in conversation.

Conversations and direct customer engagements are the key tobuilding and retaining a sizable, interactive following, since theyencourage current followers to return and help build your authorityfor new, potential followers.

3. Answer Customer’s Questions – Immediately

Research queries by Lithium resulted in 72% of customer’s siting immediacy ofresponse as critical when they have a question – a majority of these responderssay immediacy means, “less than an hour”. Not surprisingly, immediacy pays off.From the study,

One-third reported being likely to buy more from the company;

43% are likely to encourage friends and family to buy the company’sproducts;

4 in 10 are more receptive to the brands’ ads;

4 in 10 are willing to praise or recommend the brand through social media.

Read: SEO & E-Commerce: 5 Ways to Ensure Your Products are Visible inOrganic Search by Art Enke

Practice #2: Welcome and encourage external links

Why is this important?

Many top SEOs agree that getting external links is the single most importantmeans of attaining high rankings. As external links are one of the hardest metricsto manipulate, they are one of the best ways for search engines to determine thepopularity of a given web page.

In the opinion of the Moz blog (see Moz’s graphic below), external links are moreinfluential than internal links.

Top SEOs believe that external links are the most important source ofranking power.

External links pass “link juice” (ranking power) differently than internallinks because the search engines consider them as third-party votes.

How to do this?

1. Publish GREAT content on your website

2. Improve your social reputation as an authoritative leader

Use hashtags to gain visibility

Don’t hesitate to bring your content into existing threads and discussions

3. Build your local reputation by encouraging online reviews

Practice #3: Optimize your posts for searches

Why is that important?

Google tends to favor popular social media updates in the top sections of itssearch engine results pages (SERPs). It’s a key, somewhat temporary, positionyou can attain by making sure your posts are optimized for the opportunity.

How to do this?

1. Optimize keywords throughout your post. Keyword research is essential foron page optimization.

Make sure your content is written for humans. Think quality first. If you havea WordPress site, check your keyword ratio with Scribe.

Pack your content with useful facts, statistics and dates.

Limit the repetitiveness of keywords in Alt tags, title and image captions.

2. Optimize your images. Whenever you upload a photo to your blog, be sure toinclude keywords in the file name and fill out the alternate text field with a brief,keyword rich, description of the photo.

Pro tip: If there is one thing to remember when queuing up an image, it is theaspect ratio. The general rule of thumb is to keep the aspect ratio of an imageat 2:1.

Great reads:

5 Tips to Craft a Meta Description that Drives Clicks from GoogleHow to Avoid an SEO Penalty with Google Analytics AlertsHow to Create Rich Tweets by using Auto-Preview of Images and Videos

Practice #4: Influence Social Sharing

Why is this important?

Social sharing contributes to a brand’s authority much in the same way thatexternal links do. To search engines like Google, any indication of a verifiableexternal source validating your brand or your content is grounds for a smallimprovement in domain authority. Likes, shares, favorites, replies, and retweetsall count toward this increased authority.

How to do this?

The best way to encourage increased social sharing is to appeal to it directly.

Offer a specific reward for people sharing your post (like entry in a drawing

for a substantial prize).

Do an interactive survey, which encourages people to “like” a post if theyagree with you on an issue, or if they’re interested in seeing specific typesof new content.

Most importantly: Pay close attention to Millennials. Millennials are twice aslikely to purchase products they share about.

Millennials are highly active, influential, cross-device, channel-agnostic sharers. They share more often, and in turn are more likelyto be listened to: millennials users are 3.6x more likely to sharecontent on social networks, and 2.3x more likely to click back oncontent shared by their peers.

Practice #5: Increase Brand awareness

Why is this important?

This may seem like more of a branding advantage than a specific SEO advantage,but the SEO benefit is significant. For the most part, these are staple elements of asuccessful social media marketing campaign, and as with most SEO strategies, itcomes down to one basic principle: the better experience you give your users,the higher you’re going to rank in Google.

How to do this?

It’s simple. (Well, not really.) But if you follow the advice from the four previouspoints, you’re bound to be one step ahead in increasing your brand awarenessand ultimately, opening the widest possible channel for new potential customers tofind you.

Recap: Key ways to BOOST social media SEO:

1. Create Compelling Content

2. Have a Conversation

3. Answer Customer’s Questions – Immediately

4. Publish GREAT content on your website

5. Improve your social reputation as an authoritative leader

6. Build your local reputation by encouraging online reviews

7. Optimize keywords throughout your post

8. Optimize your images

9. Influence social sharing

10. Pay attention to Millennials – they are your influencers