Most people have heard of SEO, and everyone has heard of Social Media, however not many people have heard of Social SEO. The purpose of Social SEO is using Social Media to improve your websites SEO. This can be done by gain likes, Tweets and G+1 for your content and pages on your website. With Google’s and many other search engines taking Social Media shares as an indication of quality, it’s vital that Social SEO is used to give your website the advantage over your competitors.
You can not get rankings from Social SEO alone, but you can through SEO. However Social SEO increases both the awareness of your content and makes people visit your content and like to it, and the time that people spend on your website, which is another indication to search engines of the quality of your website. No one is going to spend time of poor quality content, so the time that people spend reading and browsing your website is another indicator of where your site should rank – Social SEO helps with all of this.
Think of Social SEO as an essential part of SEO, as social signals become a more important part of SEO, they are not above links from other websites, and may not be for anytime soon. They are a big part of SEO and should not be overlooked.
No major search engine has come out and said how much importance is placed upon social signals, however there is no denying that they are becoming a larger and larger part of SEO and where your website should rank.
If you are looking to use Social SEO then you should look to do the following:
- Create great content that makes people want to share it
- Make it easy for people to share it
- Set-up company pages on social platforms (also use personal accounts to further spread the word)
- Interact and communicate with people people via your social accounts
- Share your own and other peoples content through social media (make sure that you tag them into articles you share so that they may return the favour)
If you do these then this should result in…
- Social shares your content receives
- People following you on your social accounts
- More awareness of your content
- More links to your content
- More people asking you to guest post on other sites
- More visitors
- More leads and sales!!
If your business is operating in any relevant industry then using Social SEO, along side traditional SEO, is vital in order for you to compete.