circumspect dunghill: Three Proven Social Media SEO Opportunities

Monday, January 14, 2013

Three Proven Social Media SEO Opportunities

Social media isn?t solely about direct social results. There are many places on your website where social media may improve your search engine optimization (SEO) while helping your business grow its online presence. No SEO strategy can guarantee results, but these tips can help ensure that you have all the bases covered to take full advantage of the available opportunities.

Alt Tags For Icons

Alt tags for images are sometimes overlooked by website marketing managers, who are so focused on meta tags or the content of the site, that they forget the benefit other meta tags can bring.

Adding alt tags to all images on a website can increase the chances that the image gets indexed in Google Images, thus possibly leading to more traffic to your website where the image is hosted.

Social media icons are no different. Having an alt tag of ?Follow [Company Name] on Twitter? can help include two important social media keywords: the social network name and the company name.

Add Social Media Accounts Everywhere!

Be sure to share your social media links wherever it?s appropriate. If your business is listed in local directories or even national sites like Google+, Facebook or Yelp, make sure you completely fill out any fields where social media account links are allowed.

Creating a Word document or Google Drive spreadsheet of all the public account URLs can help get this done quickly without much hassle. This also includes adding URLs of social media accounts on other social media profiles you may have. For instance, Pinterest has an available field for the user or company?s Twitter URL.

When it comes to your own website, list employees? social media accounts on their bio pages, as well as on any sidebars or headers that have built-in social media integration. Be sure to include your company-wide accounts as appropriate, as well.

While this isn?t directly giving links to your own website, it is helping expand your company?s presence online, which may eventually help with search ranking, if it hasn?t already.

Additionally, research has shown that re-tweets and shares on social media may get a piece of content indexed faster. This further proves that social media needs to be an integral part of any company?s marketing strategy.

When it comes down to it, the more links a company has to its own content (whether that is on their website, blog, or social networking profiles), the? more exposure they are going to get online.

Google+ Listings And Authorship

Google and SEO consultants have reported that having a presence on Google+, Google Places, and Google Authorship (which is now all combined into the Google+ platform) can help local SEO, as well as the indexing and display of a website?s content in search engine results. Additionally, Google Authorship can help increase visibility of company content, especially if the author?s photo shows up in the search results.

Images directly in the search results, especially because there aren?t any others on the page (even in ads), instantly draw the user to that link, making them more likely to click on it.

Google has integrated business local listings and individuals who publish online content with Google+ to not only make their social network carry weight, but to also be able to tie in social activity with search, something that allows users to get a better overall view of the online behavior of similar users as well as those that are in their direct networks.

Be sure to use the Google Authorship tags on your website to bring it all back full circle, combining SEO with social media. Additionally, embed Follow or Like widgets for the popular social media networks and check these regularly (at least once a quarter) to make sure there aren?t any errors or API changes that require some editing.

Successful Social Media & SEO Strategy

Part of having a successfully combined social media and SEO online marketing strategy includes staying up to date with changes and keeping profiles and website content current. The relevancy of content and social media updates to current events or applicable searches from users will also help your company?s online presence continue to grow.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land.