Propellerads

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Top three ways to use Social Media for SEO


The search engines have made it known that social media is increasingly being used to influence their rankings – a fact that we’ve been expecting for some time. So with this knowledge in hand, what are the best ways to use social media to influence your SEO strategies?

1. Social Media Profile and Account Linking: This is the obvious first step in terms of using social media for SEO. There are plenty of link opportunities in setting up your various social media accounts and profiles. Whether it’s your Facebook page, a twitter account or your company page on Linkedin, these are all easy link building opportunities.

That said, they’re also probably the least valuable of the SEO opportunities from social media. There’s often not much “link value” provided from social profile links, but nonetheless – take advantage of every opportunity.

2. Leveraging Content: Content is the basis of all the best linking strategies. Quality content attracts links of the highest quality naturally and social media allows you to attract those links more easily than ever. It’s social media’s distribution possibilities that make it such an important asset to your SEO strategies.

There are numerous ways to leverage social media for distributing your content. Here’s just some of the primary ways:

  • Post it on your Facebook wall
  • Promote it on twitter
  • Announce it via your Linkedin account
  • Link to it from your various social media streams (posterous, tumblr, etc)
  • Blog about it on your blog
  • Share it with other bloggers and get them to discuss it on their blogs

3. Engaging in Conversations: Social Media as the name suggests is about being social. And therein is the 3rd way to leverage social media for your SEO strategies.

By engaging in relevant online conversations “naturally” you’ll gather valuable ranking indicators through your efforts. The key is to do this “naturally”, which means in a none contrived or spammy way. Here’s just some of the ways to start or engage in conversations:

  • Get involved in an industry discussion on Linkedin
  • Answer some questions on Yahoo! Answers
  • Share some news via an industry Facebook page
  • Comment on your favourite blog posts every week
  • Retweet news you read on twitter and add in your opinion
  • Write an opinion piece on your blog about something that happened in your industry

It’s important to realise that engaging in the conversations is not just about trying to sneak in a link everywhere possible. The participation in the discussions will deliver more SEO value than you realise by just being knowledgeable and authentic.

3 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  2. SEO and social media marketing shouldn't exist in separate silos. In truth, there should be an element of SEO in all of your online activities, as well as finding a way to leverage your offline marketing methods online.
    Thanks for sharing this useful tips.
    Rack Mount Monitor

    ReplyDelete
  3. It was nice article and impressive as well. I do enjoy reading your post and I find it incredible and helpful. Big thanks for sharing.


    web design Philippines

    ReplyDelete