Social Media and SEO – What’s the Connection and How Do You Maximize It?

We’ve all felt the rush when hearing the telltale chime of an incoming message. The slight excitement as you see multiple notifications calling for your attention as you pull up your preferred social platform is addictive to say the least. And then there are those days when nothing seems to happen. If you’re SEO savvy, then optimizing your social platform profiles will connect you with even more like minded individuals and maximize the value from this irreplaceable form of marketing.

5 Simple Steps to Follow to Make the Most out of Social Media

We aren’t all premium content creators, but modifying a social media profile to maximize the options is easy enough. There are few simple steps which will allow you to make the most of your online presence, often for less work than you may otherwise spend trying to get the results from just one channel out of the many you likely currently work with.

Step One: Go through and fill in as many details as possible

And as accurately as possible, and synchronize this data for the most part across all your social platforms where relevant. Use descriptive terminology and phrasing to detail your business profiles or other focuses which you need people to know about. These extended descriptions will allow the web spiders to more accurately define who you are and where you belong, ensuring that when your name and profile match up with a search query the people who are looking for you can find you.

Step Two: Optimize everything you post

Keep in mind the keywords you had determined earlier which apply to your business or venture, and use those keywords in your updates. Cross-pollinating your business names into social media platform postings and even linking website updates or forum posts to those same social media platforms will help generate positive feedback, ensuring over time that the page ranking of your site and your brand will both increases in value. In short, brag humbly, but brag to the world, let everyone know when something new comes along whether it is a new product, a new insightful blog post or even an new employee who’s going to help with promotion; as long as it’s not over the top and offensive it’s all good.

Step Three: Cross pollination is a great thing

The relatively recent explosion of social media platforms means that every single one of them is vying for market share, and most technological competent people are using at least two or three of these platforms simultaneously. In promoting your own work and your own brand, make it easy for others to re-share your shared content. A critical concept in search engine optimization is link building. The more relevant and current the inbound links to your site are, and the more of those links there are, the higher your rankings will be. So, on every blog post add Share buttons (with appropriate titles, not just ‘click here to share’), and, after those buttons are embedded into the content, link the content out to your social platforms and let the quality of your work speak for itself. If done correctly, then it will come back to you in short order. If not, then it’s just one more rung on the ladder of success.

Step Four: As obvious as it sounds, use Google’s inherent and native social platform

If you want to be noticed, then you have to be noticed by Google, and Google+ is Google’s favorite place to notice anybody. Google+ allows free business pages to be filled in by anybody who’s interested, and for an added bonus, completing the ‘local listings’ pages will increase your exposure just that much more. These business pages have the benefit of being cataloged faster than you might be able to finish completing the profile details.

In an extreme example of a backlink booster, Google+ is designed to bring like-minded people together. The aim of the platform is fundamentally different than social media platforms such as Pinterest or Facebook, which focus on your connections and build from there. Google+ starts out focused on the details of who you say you are (either as an individual or as a business) and then builds your network from there, looking to connect you to the people who might most benefit from knowing you – this sounds like an automatic internet marketing blessing.

Step Five: Keep things current, updated, active, and then wait. Making any changes takes time, and shifting the weight of an online social presence takes even more time than that. It will happen, and it will be glorious, but it does take time to see measurable differences.

Bottom Line…

Search engine optimization sounds like a big thing, and it can be; but it can also be something as simple as maintaining consistency with keywords across platforms and being proactive with positioning yourself aggressively on the cutting edge of your field, using the most comprehensive social media link building strategy you can with the resources you have available.