4 Compelling Common Sense Reasons why Social Media Should be Part of your SEO Strategy
If you have a business and a website, and want to rank that website high on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), you must have surely heard about the impact of social media on SEO.
But Are You Convinced?
Are you completely convinced that social media can and does impact your search rankings? Yes there is considerable talk of social signals, but frankly social signals only talk of correlation with higher search rankings and do not establish a clear cause and effect relationship.
So perhaps, you are unsure and can’t be bothered with all this ‘social media nonsense’ and would rather focus on productive work. Well, social media is productive work and it does produce SEO results.
Even leaving the unconvincing social signals issue aside, here are 4 compelling reasons to use social media for SEO.
4 Compelling Common Sense Reasons Why Social Media Makes SEO Sense
Gives You More Online Real Estate
Your social media profile information is indexable by Google. By filling in your profile information completely and suitably optimizing it for keywords, your social media profiles such as Facebook page, LinkedIn profile, Google+ page etc show up in the SERP, giving your more space on the first space on page 1. Thus you can dominate the premium online real estate, which is the purpose of SEO in the first place. Here is a helpful article on optimizing social media profiles for SEO.
Increases Traffic to Your Website
When you share the link to your content on social media, your fans and followers click through to your site to read the content. And when they share the link on their own social platforms, there are even more click-thrus to your site because people trust links shared by their friends.
With all this what is happening is a traffic surge to your site.
Increased website traffic is one of the basic SEO factors and accordingly pushes up your rankings.
Earns You More Organic Back Links
In step 2 (above) when more people are coming to site and reading your content, it is likely that at least some of them will link back to it from their blog or website because it will add value to their audience. Thus you have earned natural back links effortlessly (of course the effort is in writing great content).
And in the post penguin link building era of today, natural organic back links are important SEO factors that contribute to improving your search rankings.
Helps you Build Online Authority
A planned and consistent social media strategy can help you build authority in your niche. You may be a leading expert in your industry, but social media gives you the opportunity to let others know that, (obviously in a subtle way). Use social media to offer helpful tips and advice to the community, answer queries and analyze industry trends etc to slowly increase your following and earn rapid shares and back links to your content. All these are perceived as characteristics of a high authority domain, and authority websites always rank high.
Now are you convinced about social media being important for SEO?
The author of this post is Yasir Khan, one of Canada’s leading SEO consultants. Yasir has founded post penguin SEO link building company Quantum SEO Labs.
Feb 08, 2013 @ 09:27:15
Nicely written, simply put for all to understand. I believe that adding Social Media to your SEO/SEM is also one of the momst inexpensive ways to get traffic to your site. In most cases, you can do all this for free. You just need to be ready to invest a little time in doing it yourself.
Feb 08, 2013 @ 09:33:28
Agree. Also most important thing here is the quality of the content. Without it any of the described techniques will not work.