Social Media’s Role on SEO

The new year is vastly approaching and you want to drive more traffic to your website.  Makes perfect sense to us!  As a team of web designers and SEO specialists, we cannot stress the importance of SEO enough when it comes to getting more traffic to your website.  We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: social media greatly affects SEO rankings, but what is social media’s role in it all?  Here’s a few ways that social media can and will affect your SEO rankings:

Social media site content speaks to the search engines

Okay, well sort of!  Social media content, when updated regularly and when well written, lets search engines know that your business is an active online participant.  If and when social media engagement becomes a ranking factor for your website, you will surely benefit if you spend time on social media sites.  If you haven’t immersed yourself or your business in social media, now is the time to do it.  Don’t have the time?  Set up a consultation with a social media company or a marketing company well-versed in speaking social media. 

The more links back to your website the better

The more sites that link back to your website, the better your SEO rankings will be, so this means all those social media sites you have created and began using are great links back to your website.  Because social media sites point back to your website, it will help create better SEO rankings for your website.  As an SEO firm, we always tell clients to picture their website in the center of a spider’s web and that it’s their job to create extensions from that web that will bring people straight to their website.  That is exactly what creating and using social media sites will do for you.  Perhaps someone didn’t find your website yet, but they did find your social media page.  Great.  Now bring them to your website and sell them on your services and products.  That’s what it is all about!

Be an active participant

Don’t expect to receive any kind of rankings boost just because you finally set up that Twitter account last week.  You have to be an active participant and yes, the search engines know who is an active participant and who’s not.  This means that if set up your social media accounts a year ago, but have never used them, they will not do you any good.  Try to set aside time out of your day each day to post some relevant content for potential customers to read and for search engines to grab on to.  Being an active social media participant means that you are posting great, original content, reposting other people’s great content, and interacting with potential customers.  If you find that you just do not have the time consider speaking with a social media firm or a marketing company.

Social media sites provide an opportunity for optimization

Social media sites are a great place for optimization tactics to take place.  Utilize social media sites as a way to get friends, fans and followers back to your website.  Social media profiles can be optimized for search similar to internally optimizing a website, so tag your images, write a great about us or company bio and utilize those keywords. 

The ability of sharing content greatly affects rankings

Encourage friends, fans and followers to share your content.  Sharing content is a great way to give your search engine rankings a boost.  Use strong calls to action in all of your posts and encourage readers to share your content through social networks.

Comment or questions are always welcome, feel free to comment below or contact us.