Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a great form of marketing on the web, especially if you want to be found by your demographic through the various search engines like Yahoo, BING, and Google. Search engines Google and Bing have already integrated with their respective partners Google+ and Facebook, which can help businesses get discovered. The key strategy is to create relevant content for your social media channels that tie to your brand or startup’s image and demographic. Keywords from your Facebook or Twitter status updates, picture titles, and YouTube video descriptions and tags are picked up and ranked based on similar web content. The higher you are ranked, the higher up your link, Facebook, or YouTube video will appear in the search engine results.
Keywords
The first task in creating an effective social media strategy with SEO is to pick keywords that will appear consistently in the content of your social media channels. Your SEO team and your Social media team need to be on the same page to insure the consistency in the process of encoding the message or image of your brand. Once you have provided a language for your teams to follow, then you can begin creating channels online where information can be found according to your keywords. In these social channels you want to communicate with similar brands that share your interests and are making big contributions to such topics. Find contributing bloggers in the same market to feature your brand with an embedded link to your website, Facebook, YouTube channel or Twitter account. When this occurs information is then relayed to search engine sites like Google, establishing you as a credible source for the topics being discussed.
Anchor links
The words that are chosen when a link is used to direct traffic back to your social media channel should be keywords that establish the feel of your brand. This type of embedded link is called an anchor link. The words chosen for an anchor link are extra important because the more times these links are clicked the more times sites like Google take note and increases your rank with those words. Remember these keywords are relevant to your brand. Let’s say you are a first person shooter video game publisher and someone is searching for such a game, but doesn’t have a specific brand in mind. You want to make sure your brand will appear at the top of these search results. This is done by posting consistently on your website, blog and social media channels with preplanned jargon to increase the chances of your brand being found by web surfers.
To index or not to index
When all your social media channels have an anchor link that directs them to your products website you want to make sure what information is relayed to the search engines from your website. This is done on the back end of the website by choosing to index or not index specific pages or parts of your webpage. On websites you can filter out the information that is shared as either index or not index. To index means it is information that will be shared with search engines. To not index is to pick information that, although important to the website, is not important for SEO purposes. This filter process allows you to share specific information about yourself with search engines. It’s a way to increase the capability of your company being discovered by individuals searching the web.
Social media tags and frequency
There are different ways that keywords can be used with Social Media. The rule of thumb is you want to use your keywords at about 2% of the time when you post content. For example if you are writing a blog and your keyword is App, then you should use the word App twice out of every one-hundred words you type. On social media channels like Tumblr, Google+ and Pinterest, you want to make sure your content is personal, while using keywords that support your brand image and voice. Brand voice is vital because if someone is searching for a product to speak to them on the web, then your brand could be the voice that consumer hears. Pictures also use SEO, and that comes primarily from their titles and subtitles.
YouTube can increase SEO through video descriptions tags and categories. YouTube tags are important being that YouTube is the second largest search engine, is owned by Google and Google features YouTube a lot in their search engine results. You want to make sure to tag your videos correctly depending on image and voice. Twitter can be a great way to feature keywords by using them as hash tags. The real challenge is to use keywords that are trending on Twitter, while still remaining faithful to the image of your brand. The golden moment comes when you create a hash tag that begins to trend, which would increase your rating on the search engines. Implementing a strong strategy through SEO will help consumers come across your social media channels more often. This will increase traffic on your channels and bring you a higher return on investment.
Organic results
Search engine results are organic in nature, thus the best thing you can do to stay relevant is to remain consistent with your social media content posts. Do not clutter your social media channels as this will cause a low rating. Remember to always use keywords that promote your brand voice and image. Your brand is a person, and the more organic it can be, the easier it will be to gain a top position in consumers’ minds.