Social media also known as web 2.O is a powerful phenomenon that has made internet go social. Today people can easily connect with old friends, make new make friends, join groups, networks that interest you, share content or information in a casual and unrestricted manner. All these activities have been found to boost your SEO efforts immensely.
Social media is a broad term that incorporates; social networking, blogging, social bookmarking, wikis, social content sharing sites etc. social networking sites like Facebook, twitter and Google plus already boast millions of active users. The use of social medial channels has been found to be very beneficial to search engine optimization efforts. After all heavy content sharing and updating of information on a regular basis affects seo directly though in a positive way.
Here are several ways in which social media can boost your seo efforts:
Inbound Links
As you share content such as status updates, tweets, videos, widgets or applications about your company or business you provide back links to your website in the process. If people find these links useful they are likely to click them, as well as share them to more people. Major search engines such as Google use links as a major criterion when ranking websites .if you have many incoming links from different destinations then search engines take that as a vote for your website and subsequently rank your website highly.
Popularity
Websites incorporate social media widgets and applications in their websites, the level of activity such as tweeting, likes, tagging, and sharing of content directly affects your SEO efforts. Websites with high level of social media interactions are ranked heavily by search engines. Search engines love relevant and regularly updated content .if your community is engaged be sure your website will rank higher on search results.
Crawling and Indexing
85% of People use keywords to search for information on the internet. If you incorporate keywords in your social media efforts, then it means people are likely to find your company or business through search results pages (SERPS) if they use the same keywords you used to target them. Search engines crawls and index the most relevant information, this information includes your social media profiles and activities.
Authority and Relevance
SEO thrives on authority and relevance, having social media profiles of your company or business on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter is an indication to search engines that your website is legitimate and relevant. Search engines will likely rank your website highly if you have relevant and useful information on your website, as well as on all social media channels that you participate in.
For example if you are a health and safety services website specializing in fire risk assessments and your site produces case studies on recent safety issues and news, then social media is a superb way to get this content indexed and viewed. Search engines will see that your site produces relevant content regularly and therefore rank you higher in the search results.
Multimedia Sharing
Sharing multimedia content can boost your SEO efforts massively, this is because many people search for video or pictures online on a daily basis, search engines have taken note of that hence give such content lots of importance nowadays. If you can share videos or tag pictures on a regular basis then your SEO work will not be in vain, simply because search engines will incorporate them in their search results and that means more visibility for your online efforts.
