SEO for Beginners – Part Three – Social media Marketing
Welcome back and thank you for following this “SEO for Beginners” series. In our first two installments of the series we covered Website Optimization and Keyword Research. This month we’re going to cover Social Media Marketing and its importance in an SEO campaign.
For many business owners it’s not entirely clear how social media marketing influences search engine optimization. In the “beginning,” search engine optimization used to rely heavily on two things: keywords and inbound links. If another website linked into your website, Google saw this as a “vote” for your website. The more votes you had, the better you ranked. Eventually, people started manufacturing their own “votes” by building hundreds of links across the web (and many hired companies to do this for them). Well, Google caught onto this trend and started penalizing businesses who were engaging in this practice. In time, more weight was given to high quality links and less weight was given to low quality links.
Enter, Social Media. When social media arrived on the scene it completely changed everything from the way people communicated to the way they shopped and searched. Google had to take notice. Today, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google +, LinkedIn, etc. are all dynamic mini-worlds of engagement, interaction and real-time activity. Google looks at “likes” on Facebook, “retweets” on Twitter, “+1’s” on Google+. This is a new type of vote and it’s more authentic and one that can’t be manufactured easily. Like it or not, Google is evaluating your social media presence and activity. It is not enough to just be present on these networks, you must also be ACTIVE!
Inbound links are still important (high quality links, that is), but for the average business, random links on the web don’t usually drive a lot of traffic. Social media gives you the ability to get your content out in front of people in real time. That’s real traffic which could lead to real customers. Take advantage of it!
Figure out where your target market is spending their time. Facebook caters to a very broad demographic, while Pinterest is inhabited primarily by females and LinkedIn by businesses and business professionals. Is your target market on LinkedIn? Instagram? Twitter? Figure out where your market is spending their time and then create profiles on those networks. Make sure your branding aligns on both your website and social media profiles and then start sharing (and re-sharing) content that your audience cares about. As your fan bases grow and your content is shared, Google will take notice and your business will be considered more relevant.
This is a very broad overview of how social media impacts search engine rankings. Getting into the finer details of these networks will require a more indepth discussion which we will cover in another in post. Until then, I hope you found this installment of our SEO series helpful. As always, if you have any questions, please email me Amy Grishman at amy@socialfocus.com. Until next month, Happy Holidays!