he Journey of a thousand miles start with taking the first step…that’s what is most important in undertaking any adventure.
This analogy maybe compare to the ever evolving world of search engine optimization for starters becoming professionals. While the task, steps or whatever needed to achieve better search engine visibility maybe overwhelming – this can never be achieved without taking the first steps.
While everything – the art and science – about searching engine optimization best practices seems to be changing and adapting itself to the continual algorithm changes, updates and very deep complex of Google and other major search engines, the rules are not created in a day.
By: webtreats
This makes it a bit difficult to predicts which leading industry best practices will eventually lift your business above your competitors and making sure your web pages always hit the first pages of SERP.
But following from experience and some other factors – we do know that there are some little things that can be done to enhance your website popularity, quality targeted traffic, search ranking and in return boost revenue on a consistent cost-effective basis.
Social media has become part of our today’s SEO strategies and the good news for entrepreneur looking to leverage on social media strategies to boost SEO and their search organic traffic is that there are marketing tactics that never consider spamming or out of favor. These are considered as one of industry best practices and never seem to be out of practices in long distance.
The era of relying “ONLY” on quality content and inbound links seems to be decline as fast as I know. If you want more better result from your online business, then is obvious you’ll need look more closer at how social media influence these result and most especially – organic search traffic.
Though, Google as come out on many occasion to defend this claim that social signal do not affect search ranking. But from what I can tell…..social signal do affect organic search traffic.
That’s a discussion for another day!
Lets move on with how social media strategies can boost your organic SEO efforts.
1. Quality Content.
There is no and I don’t think there will ever be a or any substitute for this.
Quality content is the beginning of marketing strategy in internet marketing; if you can produce high relevant quality information that solves users needs and wants, then the battle to win over your potential customers is already half way won.
And not only that, but you have also set a good foundation to a better search engine optimization process.
Here is a good post I write not too long ago that deals with how to improve your writing skills.
2. Use Paid Social Advertisement.
This one tricky and debatable – but from experience I’m saying this.
Each time I run an ads campaign on Facebook that has a positive result, I see a slightly increase in my organic traffic from Google search engine. Reason I don’t know or understand why this have to be so – something am still trying to figure out why and what might be the cause.
And also, I have come across other marketers sharing their experience on this too. Maybe you test it out yourself and see what result you get.
3. Make Social Sharing Easy.
Your blog post is not the only place to include your social sharing buttons.
Include them in your email newsletters and if possible in all out going promotional messages that goes out on behalf of your brand name. This helps to make your content reach more people who you can’t possibly reach and increase your opt-in rate.
At the end of each blog post , kindly ask for social share like I would also be glad to see you share this post on your different social networking sites. Here is a post by Ian Cleary of RazorSocial that writes on how to make it easy to have your audience sharing your quality content and effective tools you can use to ease the task of content sharing.
4. Be Active.
Yes, without been active on social media it could be a daunting task to command the attention of your potential customers. If you don’t have all the time in this world to spend on your social activities, you can out source it to visual assistance or get someone from places like fiverr, odesk etc to do it for you.
Not everyone has the time to hang around in these social media places, but their importance to online marketing could make us rethink in our time management.
5. Use Google Authorship.
Simply put – put your face to your work!
That’s how I see the reason behind Google Authorship verification process. Authorship is one the best features of Google+ and it not only impact your SEO ranking but also helps in increasing click-through rate.
Lets assume you search for a particular keyword phrase and it happen that you’re in my Google+ circle, Facebook friends or wherever and this picture of mine stand by one of the result linking back to my web page…
you definitely might want to check out what your friend have to say to you – and that help me gain more click-through rate. There is a small piece of code (rel=author) that you’ll need to copy and paste into your web pages to allow your profile picture stand next to your listing in Google search.
If you click on the name of the author that appear on the search result, this will take you to the Google+ page of that author which may result in joining his circle. The power of images can do a lot here too and make the difference in click-through rate as searchers may likely click on the result with author’s image stand next to it than the one without author image in the result.
To add (rel=author) code and claim Google authorship for your published content read this post from socialmediaexaminer that gives you a very comprehensive details on all you need to know about Google authorship.
These are just five and not in any way a conclusive list of social media strategies to boost SEO efforts; I’ll be glad if you can include your in the comment box below so we can both keep updating this post with fresh relevant point that help users make the most inform decision.