Improving SEO by Using Social Network Sites
The expansion in the use of social networks for marketing purposes has led to many analysts looking at the effect that links and comments on Facebook and other similar sites has on the search engine optimization (SEO) for corporate websites. In the past it was thought that these sorts of sites had little influence on how the crawlers rated a site but current opinion on this is changing as the statistics are becoming more apparent.
Links between Social Networks and Better SEO Ratings
Many businesses have begun to look at social networks more closely in the past year or so as their potential for generating customers has become more developed. The major search engines have also begun to crawl through these sites more regularly and deeper than they have previously, meaning that the content on them is affecting search engine results pages (SERP) more than it used to. Because the most weight is given to dynamic content on social media sites it is important to post links to good content on your own company website to ensure that your marketing posts achieve the longest possible shelf life. This, in turn, makes them more important in the crawler’s analysis of that particular social site and boosts the overall SEO ranking of the page that the link leads to. Blog style pages have come to replace the traditional static webpage design of corporate websites and linking the social network of a corporate blog page with social media sites further enhances the SEO rating. Now it is vital to not only have good content but also to have a strong social network presence in order to achieve the top SERP results in most niches and so having a good social marketing strategy is the key to effective online marketing.
The Social Media Links that Generate Better SEO Results
While placing links to your company website on Facebook or Twitter will help to improve your SEO, it is by having people ‘like’ you or, even better, share your post with their friends that will give you the best results. The best way to generate a better SEO rating with social network sites is to have your fans or followers post the links to your site on their own pages. Creating posts that encourage people to share or repost your updates should be one of the objectives of your online marketing and offering incentives for the most ‘shares’ in a week or a month can be an effective SEO building strategy.
Social Media Buzz and SEO
With the crawlers placing more emphasis in their results on content of the social network sites it is important to make sure that the content that you add to it is good quality and generates conversation about your niche topic. The greater the number of people that comment on the posts that you make, and on the shares and re-posts of it, the greater the buzz about you will be and the higher the SEO rating from it will be too. This kind of marketing takes time to develop because it is organic but it is also the best kind of target audience to have as it is already generally focused on your particular niche. This means that you will be able to market your products with a good conversion rate for longer than to a less engaged audience.
So obviously it is important to have a platform where you post all of the content that you use to market your business on social media sites and for more businesses now that corporate webpages take the form of blogs. One of the weaknesses that is beginning to emerge with many established corporate websites is that their static nature is preventing them from achieving a better SEO rating and their content isn’t interesting enough to be shared on social network sites. The trend in online marketing is now heading towards building good SEO using dynamic, constantly updated web pages and then backing that up by creating social network buzz about their product or niche. This makes the corporate website still the more important component of an online presence for a business, but only just.
Improving Search Engine Results using Social Network Marketing
Having a good, informative and interesting corporate website is a necessary basis upon which to begin to build a strong SEO for your niche and there are many effective methods of using the social networks to improve your SEO further. One thing that even experienced marketers often forget is to have a lot of links to your home page and not just to the pages for the products that you are selling. The crawlers will give your home page a better ranking if it has the most incoming links to it online and then that good SEO will filter down to all of the subpages. If possible, use video or at least images as the shared content rather than just text as it will be given greater weight by the social media sites and it also gets a better rating than text from the spiderbots.
The frequency with which promotional material gets posted on social sites is important too. If you post too often it may adversely affect your target audience but if it is too infrequent there is the danger that your brand will be forgotten. It is important to experiment with how often you should post links or status updates on social network sites to get the most benefit from them. It is also important to use more than one social network site and not just to focus your marketing on Facebook or Google+, for instance, as having links from multiple sites will add further weight to them when the crawlers find them spread across cyberspace.
One final aspect to consider is to remember to link all of the online sites together so that the spiderbots recognize that they are all parts of the same entity. Link your company website to your entire social network accounts with ‘follow me’, ‘like’ and ‘+1’ buttons and so on and at the same time link the various sites to one another. This will take advantage of the opportunity to create several in-house links between the various parts of your web presence that are exactly what the crawlers are looking for when they give your page its ranking.
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