Griffin Clayburn is an expert SEO consultant offering services to many of the leading local businesses in Brisbane. His articles and quick tip posts on social media sites and blogs are popular.

Leveraging Social Medial Resources to Improve your Search Engine Ranking

“What is your understanding of how social media impacts search engine optimization?

“Are your social efforts and search engine initiatives properly aligned?”

There are many such questions regarding the connection between social media and SEO, which is still a largely unexplored domain for many of the digital marketers. Even for many experts, it is not entirely clear how social media impacts SEO results.

So, in this article, we will try to identify some of these social media resources that actively help to expand the reach of SEO.

Why is social media SEO needed?

You cannot make a website popular with just good content. A high ranking in the SERPs is indicative of the popularity and visibility of a particular site or web page. So, if you want to get better performance for your website, you need to look into every possibility of marketing your business, and that includes social media marketing.

Primarily, SEO revolves around two basic things as:

• Usage of the right keywords
• The number of high-quality backlinks on your site

With the advent and growing popularity of social media platforms, online marketers saw new avenues to expand their efforts into. All the major search engines have now started considering social media signals such as Facebook likes, retweets, and Google+’s as key metrics to determine a website’s position in the search results.

SEO and social media are co-players

As you may already know the importance of social media in SEO, we can move onto the next level and talk about how you can well align the social media and SEO efforts to reap the best results. Here, we will discuss the best practices that will take you closer to your goals.

• Posting high-quality content
  

Though pretty much everyone knows that content is the king, it does not hurt to emphasize it enough. As per industry trends, it can be said with certainty that great content will remain in demand in the future as well. If you set the content right at the first point, you can rest assured about a strong foundation for SEO success.

Why is content an essential part of a successful SEO strategy?

As you know, Google always knitted its search engine algorithms with a keen focus on quality-over-quantity to drive website traffic. Quality content naturally attracts more customers and contributes to the overall visibility and user acceptance of the site. Good content is also the backbone of social media marketing too. While planning for content, your strategy should go further beyond simply link building and keyword optimization.

• Ensure social sharing is easy

It is an ideal move to get your Brisbane readers and followers to share your content on the social media platforms like Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Google+, Linkedin or other networks with one click, which instantly gives you the opportunity to be seen by more people. Through this approach, your content potentially reaches to thousands of prospects.

We can compare the new-age social sharing to the value of the traditional word-of-mouth marketing, which helps to drive more traffic and new business to a particular brand. You have to give your readers instant and straightforward methods for sharing. The smart marketers now integrate this with quick takeaways which prompt the followers to share deliberately.

You can get more insight into this topic by doing internet research and reading articles like “How to Inspire Fans to Share Your Stories.” The major initiative marketers can note in this regard is that brands have now stopped talking about themselves and started talking more about their customers.

• Boost your profile and images

If you have been doing social networking and blogging for a while, you may know the importance of images and videos as a powerful source of traffic. The problem here is that many of the marketers often overlook them by focusing more on written content. It is true that content is king when it comes to SEO, but it is the images and videos that make it more enjoyable to the users, which, in turn, contributes to the popularity of your pages.

• Always include authorship metadata

While using social media platforms like Google+, the most vital aspect to consider is authorship. Putting it simply, this is the feature that allows the author’s image to appear right next to the content they have created in the search results. Google authorship now has a significant impact on SEO. Author ranking is proving to be one vital component in search engine performance. So, the ideal approach to improve your online reputation is by becoming a thought leader in your niche. To start with, all you need to do is to add a recognizable face to all your work and let it get slowly popularized.

Many bloggers still don’t know how to add authorship to the content they publish. If you are among them, a good starting point is to read “How to Add Google Author Tags to Your Blog for Improved Search Results.”

• Always gauge your social media performance

Whatever goal you set for SEO through social media, it is always necessary to keep on analysing your efforts and outcome as a key to be effective. When you keep a close track of what you do and analyse what is working and what is not, you can further focus on the things which matter the most and fine-tune the campaigns.

There may be many reasons why your brand uses social media at the first place as:

• Enhancing brand awareness and acceptance
• Lead generation
• Driving sales
• Customer care

So, to know whether all these goals are met in the most desired manner, you need to measure them.

These are just a few general insights you should remember while devising a social media strategy for SEO enhancement. Furthermore, social media comes as one key element among many in terms of attaining the desired SEO results, and we will discuss more such elements in the forthcoming articles.