Social Media Marketing Strategies That Benefit Your SEO

Google used to find useful content by keyword relevancy. However, Google is now using Google Social Search to endorse useful and relevant links. Links that are shared by people you know now carry more weight than simple keyword ranking.

You can go from number 30 in the search engine results to number 3 just because someone in your Google+ circles shared your link.

A link from a high ranking website can jump your post from number 9 to number 1. Clearly, we can’t afford to ignore Social Media any more.

The benefit here is that any business can rank high in the search engines regardless of their look or size.

You should already be using Social Media as a marketing strategy. However, now is the time to make sure Social Media helps your search engine optimization. Failure to use social media can cost you dearly. Your website will simply be lost in the crowd.

Here are steps you can take immediately.

1. Get a Google+ Presence Immediately

Google+ has become too important for search engine optimization to ignore. Even G+ posts, related pages and users are displaying in normal search results. When you jump a few places in the search engine rankings because someone put you in a circle, you will realize the benefit.

2. Concentrate on Increasing Your Followers and Building Relationships

Articles you write and thoughts you share can now appear in the search engine search results of your followers, even if they don’t belong to the social or bookmarking site you used to share the link. The search engines see your friendships on other networks. This means your online relationships now have a huge impact on your search engine search results.

It is therefore in your best interest to have more friends and followers on the major social networking sites.

3. Start Posting Your Articles on Social Media Straight Away

Posting your new article links to the major social networking sites now helps your blog to get indexed faster. The last blog I made for a client was indexed within a week.

To get indexed even faster, you need to make the posting automatic. You can use a service like Onlywire for this.

4. Focus on Sharing Your Content with Your Followers

Sharing your blog posts and having your friends share them to their networks makes your posts go viral which means the networks of your friends will be able to see and share them too. This will boost your search engine results tremendously.

5. Add Like and +1 Buttons to Absolutely Everything

Even advertisements now have +1 buttons next to them.

6. Use “Rel=me” & “Rel=author” Tags

Ask your web designer to add the “Rel=me” and “Rel=author” tags to your “single.php” file to tell the search engines that you are the author of your work. This will cause your photo to appear next to your article in the search results. and will encourage people who like what they read to click on your photo and connect with you.

7. Get a Pinterest Account

Pinterest is fast becoming a force to be reckoned with and gives higher search engine results than Twitter, apparently. For this to work, you need to optimize each picture with a keyword.

8. Add Social Media Buttons to Your Site

You need to have social media buttons at the bottom of every post so that people who like your content have a way of sharing it. You need the usual ones like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ but also Pinterest and Stumbleupon.

Again, Onlywire is quite good and if you install the Onlywire Plugin to your blog, all the social media and bookmarking buttons are there and people just need to open it and click on the one they want.

Because social media is becoming increasingly important in search engine results, you owe it to yourself and your business to get a social media strategy in place.