Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Using Social Media To Boost SEO

Google’s Penguin algorithm update was designed to allow the Google search engine to tell good websites apart from poor quality ones.
Whether your website has been affected by the Penguin and Panda updates or not, you need to stay alert to the general direction that Google is taking with these updates. Google uses these updates to help promote only good, useful websites on its search results. If you don’t respond to these new efforts by Google, you could well find your search engine ranking yanked out from under you on a future update.
How the social media figure in your efforts to rank well
While Google cannot actually understand the content on a website to know if it is valuable, it can turn to the general public for a few clues. When human visitors on a website approve of what they see, they are likely to talk about their experience on the social media. Checking out a page’s social media activity, then, is a valuable way by which Google can tell if a website is really popular.
Going forward, social signals are likely to grow in their importance to Google’s ranking algorithm. Businesses need to try their best to gather a following of people who talk about them on the social networks. It may not even be enough to do this on Facebook. Gathering a following on Google’s own Google+ social network will be important to ranking on Google in the future. Google, after all, has better access to content on Google+ than content on Facebook.
Building a following on the social networks
Many business websites try to game Google by buying fake Facebook Likes and building fake Facebook pages that they can get to follow their websites. While these moves might net you a reasonable search ranking for some time, you never know when the next Google or Facebook algorithm update will find you out.
It would be a far better way to simply start with a quality content marketing plan and publish good content that draws genuine interest. When you get a genuine following behind your website, you can earn your social visibility on Google the safe and natural way.
Publishing good content isn’t as difficult as it sounds. Often, the social networks themselves offer great clues on what to write about.
  • Look at the comments to your blog posts and social media posts. Often, these comments are about the questions that readers have. Answering these questions can be a great way to finding interesting ideas to write about.
  • Check out social media pages to do with your general industry. You are likely to come across a number of instances where people ask questions. If you are in the landscaping business, for instance, you can find plenty of questions by people about what time is best to plant a lawn, to prune trees, and so on. If you are in the interior design business, you will see people asking questions about how to make hardwood floors less slippery and how to make a large room look cozy, among other things.
Using the social networks to build backlinks
You need to market your blog to your social following. You can do this by placing links on your social networking accounts for each new blog post that you publish. You can make use of automated tools to do this. These tools can repeatedly announce new blog posts on your social networking accounts to get people’s attention. The more people read your new blog posts, the more likely you are to get backlinks and improve your search rankings.
It is best to not completely rely on the search engines
Google’s algorithm updates aren’t precise. They cause considerable collateral damage. Legitimate websites often see their search engine rankings fall when Google releases an update. Every business should try to reduce its reliance on natural search engine visibility for this reason. A strong social media presence can be a good way to achieve this. When you have a dependable following on the social media, you can rely on your visibility on those media even if the search engines don’t support you.
Trying your best to build yourself up as an authority in your niche is a good way to gain visibility on the social media. When you publish regular posts that prove you an authority in your field, you become the primary resource to head for when people need the kind of information you provide. This kind of reputation is what helps websites survive fickle search engine algorithms.

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