Search Engine Guide put out an interesting bit last year about how to optimize your pages for ranking…it was so insightful for SEOs and multiple web hosting companies we’ve summarized it her for you.
With social media pages now becoming more and more important for online marketing campaigns, SEOs everywhere are trying to figure out how to get their social media pages to rank highly alongside their main brand pages.
Social media is a great way to further dominate the top 10 Google listings for your brand, and additionally for the keywords you hope to target. The idea is that using social media, you can work in some of the keywords you hope to rank highly for, incorporate your own content such as press releases, then fill out the SERP results for those terms.
Here are a few ways to finagle the social media pages you choose to use so that they reflect your intent:
Get More Followers –
The more followers you have via Twitter, Facebook, etc., the more weight your social media page carries for search engines. While the algorithm is hard to discern, it’s important to have lots of relevant followers while at the same time following relevant people yourself. Google will connect the dots here and relate the two web properties.
Optimizing the Pages’ URL and Meta Tags –
Check to see which parts of your page and description are being used as Meta Tags by social media sites and plan your profile accordingly. Don’t waste this valuable chance to claim your meta data the way you want.
Link to Your Own Content –
New content seems to be indexed much faster when it’s linked to on social media sites, so point to your own stuff to get it to show up in SERPS! The added benefit to this is that your content will also gain exposure much more rapidly when it’s been spread virally.
Make Your Updates Count –
Especially important for Twitter, be sure to optimize your Tweets (and any other social media content) so that search engine results show what you want them to. In the case of Twitter, only about the first 30 characters show in results, so use those for your keywords. On Facebook, keep your status updates relevant to your brand as this helps build association for the engines.
Build Links –
When you’re creating a linkbuilding campaign, be sure to include links to your social media pages as well. Inbound links to these sites are extremely valuable, so include them in the header or wherever possible. Be sure to remember that just as with regular SEO, the needs of the user are the first priority. Don’t spam up your social media just because you’re trying to benefit your SEO efforts. Thanks to Heather Hendrick for the summarization
