Internet days of old pitted webmasters against each other, attempting to farm links through FFA or even write forum posts which demeaned their business credibility. With the evolvement of social media platforms, the world has the opportunity to speak its mind on various products, pictures, services and businesses in general.
Within the last five years, however, the strength social media has gained can also positively, or adversely, affect one’s search engine positioning simply through the lack of linking, or linking to the wrong social category. SEO specialists realize the intrinsic power contained in SMM campaigns which is why many successful campaigns merge both styles of marketing.
In the below piece, we carefully examine three ways social media marketing assists your SEO efforts without question so your business can implement a holistic approach to keeping reputable social strategies and increasing search engine positioning.
Relevance Through Inbound Links
Linking, both internally and through external sources, builds the relevance of everything in life. From the beginning of internet days, to our competitive present, linking has been the center of arguments, drops in rankings and now has become the epitome of social media marketing campaigns. Through an accurate social media campaign, inbound links can spring up – and never again will you need to guy comment links or purchase high-PR links.
Here are several ways that inbound links are adjudicated for SMM:
- Networking blogs – by connecting your blog to aggregators, or submitting your feed into Facebook, you’ll obtain valuable inbound links on high authority websites which will also increase your readership.
- Social bookmarking – harnessing the power, exposure and age of Digg will allow savvy social media marketers to use bookmarks to drive relevant inbound links which are immediately indexed to websites provided the correct category for submission is chosen.
- Pollination – by making slides of posts on Scribd and other slide share websites, your original post link can draw not only heavy page views, but also massive link juice which can increase social media stature.
- Kindle publishing – perhaps slightly more lengthy, publishing your content on Kindle will also give valuable backlinks through your digitally written works.
- Video sharing – making a video of your website, along with a customized description containing your site link, can build a valuable authority link to your website.
Even submitting applications to Android and iTunes marketplaces will draw backlinks to your site, especially when you’ve placed your site link within the description which is surrounded by keywords. Many more plausible social media efforts relevant to article writing, RSS submission and more can increase awareness and backlinks which are free of charge.
Social Media Damage Control
As with anything that can affect us through virility, social media can damage a business’ reputation quicker than it got started, and hence must be controlled through measures which must be taken daily, monthly and weekly without fail. Here are some key ideologies which you must keep at heart when dealing with damage control of your good repute:
- Handle slander with tact. You cannot point fingers or play childish “˜he said’ games when dealing with naysayers or verbal attack artists. Therefore, when you are being attacked, it needs to be nurtured and turned into factual and tactfully worded rebuttals.
- Find opportunity in negativity. Use the forceful, discerning and controversial posts or comments as an opportunity to rise above and win fans. When your voice projects correct business and personal verbiage that soothes instead of fuels fires, you’ll potentially win a once upset customer as potentially a new client.
- Offer direct communication. Instead of airing your dirty laundry online, offer direct communication via phone, live chat or email to pull the arguments or dissatisfactions away from the open community. This tends to work better and allows your reputation for handling direct threats or bad words to increase your business favorability.
- Never make empty promises. If you intend on handling something in such a manner, make darn sure you stick to your guns. People who see you promised one thing and stated or acted another way will call you out on your self-insulting ways.
- Handle things as you would at home. If you don’t yell, scream or condescend your ideas or thoughts towards your children, wife or friends, why do it across your business pages? Remember that your very words can destroy or build an empire. Choose them wisely.
At the end of the day, your overall reputation management, or the lack thereof, will be a decisive factor in your rankings because of algorithmic changes which can now detect interactions and disconnections, and grade your website accordingly. Therefore, make sure your marketing plan and business model have features in place to properly maintain social media damage control, or pay the consequences in ranking penalties.
Page Rank Increases
Google is beginning to socially gauge interactions across the social media platforms and, along with your current website, grading your page rank according to Tweets, Facebook likes, video shares and LinkedIn popularity. Culminating those rankings, along with content and linkage, make a singular increase or drastic decrease in page rank completely possible.
We now investigate the best ways to increase your social media page rank, otherwise gauged as EdgeRank.
- Publishing your content through social media RSS can drastically increase your social media rank, page views, interactivity and make the content resonate your business brighter than before. Google indexes Facebook, too, and all pages relevant to its composition. Therefore, you need to leverage this power. People can subscribe to your blog through social media, too, which Google sees as customer loyalty – and heavy ranking points.
- Make tweets make sense; in other words, instead of tweeting how you went and got inebriated one night at the pub, tweet a thought relevant to your daily content with a link to said content. People who actually read your tweet timelines will see your business model is strong and be more apt to following it – another huge bonus to page ranks.
- Blog posting is as social media as it gets. Collecting others’ blog posts which are relevant accomplishes three things: 1) gives your site valuable content which you’d normally have to produce yourself, 2) allows people to place relevant backlinks to their site, which establishes a connection in Google and increases both your ranks and 3) shows interactivity on your blog – which is a heavily regarded weighing tool Google is now using to gauge popularity.
- Comments that make sense -along with related links to your site backing your words – make for top-notch engagement points which can be used to weight both your interaction, link relevance and help the authoritative presence of your counterparts.
Conclusion
Social media has become high on the importance list when Google decides to annually rank websites. With factors in place such as social media reputation management, content fed into social sites and interactions on both your blog and others, it’s suggested that businesses take their plans to the drawing board and include every nook, cranny and corner of their social media presences to assure they’ve adequately included all angles with contingency plans in place to increase social ranking. Read over the algorithmic standards set by EdgeRank to see exactly what is heavily regarded and what is ignored.
About The Author: This article is written by Tim Wilson. Tim works as content manager at HostPapa.