Top 10 SEO tips for social media

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is at the tip of every business owner’s tongue. With 94% of rankings as a result of organic, natural SEO and only 6% as a result of paid-for methods, getting your SEO in line is key to your business doing well online. And did you know that the way you use social media can help improve your SEO as well? If not, read on, and if you did, you should still read on anyway...

1. Create unique ‘about us’ content for all of your social media channels, don’t copy from one to the other. This gives you more unique content for searches, which we know is the prime way to improve your SEO.
2. If you’re uploading images or videos to any of your channels, make sure its name in your folder is something relevant to the image. The name of the file can be seen by search engines.
3. If you’re looking for local business, make sure your address and location are detailed in the profile.
4. Create shareable content on social media; likes, comments, +1s, repins, retweets and shares can help you create more inbound links to your website.
5. Add social share buttons to individual pieces of content on your website. Check out the bottom of this page and you’ll see the buttons to be able to share this content directly through your social media channels. This again helps to create more inbound links to your website by having content easily shared across the web.
6. Make Google+ your friend. In the UK, Google is responsible for around 90% of search engine traffic. So you can’t ignore its own social network if you’re going to maximise your SEO potential. Spend a few minutes every day or so sharing your content, optimising your profile and networking with other relevant profiles. Google loves Google+.
7. Grow your followers. Having 10,000 followers gives you more credibility than 100. This doesn’t mean paying for new followers as they’re often fake. You need engaged relevant followers you are going to engage with your content. So take the time to build it organically as the quality of your followers can be detected.
8. Use Google Authorship. Google allows an author to associate their content with their Google+ profile to ensure that their account and bio are linked to the content in search results. Include the rel+”author” tag on your website, and include a link to your G+ profile in articles you’ve written. This applies to business “authors” as well.
9. TWEET! Google trawls the internet for content and creates an index, which is a pretty tedious process given the amount of content available online. Twitter has helped cut the time it takes to find your content, and the faster your content is indexed by Google, the faster your organic traffic is likely to increase. So tweet!
10. Finally, engage with other business and people on social media and do it genuinely (commenting, liking, posting relevant content to other pages). This helps to do lots of this things already discussed; it gets your name out there, encourages people to follow you and shares links.

Hopefully that gives you a starter in making your social media channels work for your SEO as well. For help with embedding social media channels in your website, adding social share buttons and writing unique content, get in touch: hello@webfwd.co.uk.