Today’s post is a guest post contribution from Taylor Manning.
If you’re running an online business, you know SEO {search engine optimization} can be terribly confusing. Search engine rankings, authority, backlinks and all of technical terms and strategies can seem like mumbo jumbo to someone who is learning about it for the first time.
There’s also that irritating problem of Google changing its algorithm constantly. What constituted appropriate SEO five years ago is like saying we should all ride T-Rex’s to work.
Believe it or not, social media plays a big role in SEO these days, which is good news. After all, it’s safe to say most of us use it both in our business and personal lives.
Search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo have been asked about the effect that social media has on a websites ranking and it turns out, social media can really boost your search engine ranking.
Your Social Media Profiles
First of all, if you do a search on a business or a person, odds are their social media accounts will show up, even if their website does not.
Google+ shares a company’s profile on the right hand side of the Google search. This is a free way to make your business standout in the search engine without intense SEO work.
Your profile name and bio are two highly indexed parts of your profile. If someone types in keywords in either of these, the chances of your profile coming up in the search engine are very high.
The more followers you have on your profile, the higher search engines will rank you as well. This means you should focus on growing these pages with great content, in order to boost your visibility on and off the platform.
Shares are equivalent to backlinks
When someone shares your Facebook status or retweets you on Twitter, you are actually earning a backlink. Backlinks are just a fancy of way of saying when another website links to your content in some way. Google uses backlinks as a way to establish authority for a website. In other words, the more other sites that link into you, the better your SEO.
Not all backlinks are created equal of course. Google takes into consideration the number of shares and the quality of the profiles sharing your posts. A retweet on Twitter won’t count the same way a New York Times article linking to you might, but if your post goes viral on social media, all those links will boost your ranking and authority.
People don’t have to directly share something you’ve already posted – a backlink can also come from someone simply sharing something directly from your blog or website. In order to make this more likely, you want to make sure you have share buttons, click to tweet quotes, pin buttons on your images and anything else that may make your content more sharable.
Social platforms are search engines
While Google and Bing may be industry leaders- Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and all other social platforms are used as search engines on a daily basis.
Every day, people are searching social media for all sorts of how to’s, ideas and tips.
When you use keywords and hashtags in your social media posts, it opens to door to be found not only with Google, but also on the social media platforms themselves.
Social media is key to your SEO success in today’s world
Search engine algorithms are much smarter and more complex today in 2015 and take into consideration the relevancy & amount of social shares. Remember, social platforms are websites too, and Google spiders will crawl the pages much in the same way it crawls yours – following all those links!
A direct benefit of your social media activity {aside from SEO} is that it also increases you visibility and brand awareness. Old SEO tactics such as buying large amounts of backlinks or keyword stuffing your articles – are simply spammy, fake, and useless in today’s SEO scene. Use social media to engage your followers builds your brand AND boosts your SEO.
What you can do right now
If there is one thing you can do to boost your SEO right now, make sure all your social media profiles are up-to-date, verified, and complete.
Taylor Manning is a marketing strategist and web designer with a passion for helping woman entrepreneurs succeed in their online business. She loves to blog, work on the couch with her dog and travel. You can find her at taylormanningcreative.com and on Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram at @taylormcreative.
