Why Social Media Marketers Need To Understand Certain Things About SEO
The Social Media Marketer’s SEO Checklist
Getting a webpage to rank highly in the search engines takes a combination of disciplines together with Social Media and SEO. To be able to help out with rankings and campaigns, the Social Media marketer needs to understand some stuff regarding SEO so as to be successful at promoting content.
Normally within the SEO trade, links are the same as money in that the bigger the authority, the more powerful it becomes. For a long time, a lot of SEOs blew off links from social media websites like for instance Facebook and Twitter. They felt these links didn’t have much direct SEO value because of the facts these links are often always “nofollowed.” Nowadays, Google and Bing use Twitter and Facebook on a regular basis so as to influence search results. The individual in charge of Social Media for a corporation can likewise start to think similar to an SEO with some simple tips.
Usually, the key people who work on the Facebook and Twitter accounts would likely be a marketer but will not likely be an SEO. The following checklist can help the Social Media Marketer in your group with some SEO tips and best practices to think about when they begin their next social campaign or blog post.
Do Keyword Research
Keyword research is one of the first steps when optimizing a web site for search and it is no different in Social Media. It is important because your social campaign can now help influence the search engines. Utilizing the Google Adwords Keyword Tool is a good place to start. By inputting several keywords which come to mind which you think searchers would be looking for to find your content, the tool would then provide you estimated monthly traffic numbers for those keywords together with other links it thinks are the same.
To start with, do some initial research regarding the topics you are going to cover and see what keywords which make the most sense. You will want the keywords with the most traffic, while you will want to focus on keywords based on their difficulty to rank well. The selected keywords will come into play as you deliver your Facebook updates and tweets. The keywords will likewise be essential when you look at the meta description and the Title tag.
Independent research determined that to be able to get a web page to rank quicker, either by lots of tweets or by the direction of inbound links, showed that the Tweeted version ranked 1 in the experiments, whilst the usual linked versions did not show as much improvement. This probably indicates that tweets may probably influence rankings more than links.
One key implement is to have tracking set up before your initial launch. You may already have a certain way to track URLS, but another option is to set up a simple way to see all the “Social” traffic at one time. In order to determine which URL shortener to utilize, it is vital to choose one which will provide some analytics regarding clicks like bit.ly and also pick one that will do a 301 redirect from the short URL to yours. By doing that, you would be able to keep as much of that link traffic flowing to your own site as possible.
One different method to see the efforts of your campaign, one can utilize a personalized shortener, which is just like making use of bit.ly but with ones’ own shortened domain label. It is a way to receive data regarding how many clicks an URL gets, what part of the world the clickers are from and what time of the day the links are clicked.
There are different ways to build direct links to your content also like for instance adding widgets and embeds in order to help build links to your website or web page. Additionally, adding sharing buttons for Twitter, Stumbleupon and Facebook would possibly provide a spike in social sharing. Certain types of content like for instance infographs, graphs and so forth are easy to share in this manner.
OKCupid has various interesting effects on their blog for instance. At the bottom of the web page, there is a hover-over that enables you a simple way to copy and paste the link as well as easily share the content on the social networks. Your SEO will be thankful if you likewise remember how to build links to the page in the conventional method while working on easy and fast ways to make your content shareable in the social networks.
Canonicalize the Page
To “canonicalize” the web page means to make only the URL of the particular web page visible to the search engines only. When setting up the tracking of your social shares this can be something to consider. There would be URL tracking variables appended to the URL whether you get tweets from an RSS feed our whether you utilize Google Analytics tracking.
Even though search engines are improving their ability to decipher the details, you certainly want to make it clear so they could determine which page is the real or “canonical” page. There are several various ways to accomplish this. Multiple SEOs would claim this is the “proper” method to accomplish it, yet it is not always the simplest to apply. This is especially true if you are in charge of Social Media and do not have quick access to the dev team. Is the site capable of handling the load if ever the campaign goes viral? If the website slows down because of unnecessary JavaScript or possible an infographic which takes a long time to load, are you prepared?
It is now smart to consider speed as a ranking factor because Google has announced over the last year that they are making speed a factor in rankings, albeit a small one. Speeds could be affected if the traffic spikes so when possible, work with your dev team to load test the entire site or load test the page before launching a new campaign in order to ensure success.
It could be tempting to use elaborate titles in your social content because it is somewhat catchier as opposed to a normal “optimized” title. There are several things to consider regarding keywords: The Title tag is rumored to be the highest on-page ranking factor, hence, having your keywords at the beginning of the title is most advantageous. The title tag would show up if your social efforts get a page ranking in Google.
Meta Description
The meta description would not help with getting a page’s rankings. In the social world, its often the text which is automatically pulled into a social web site. Facebook for example, when a link is added to your “wall” it automatically pulls the title tag, and meta description and enables you to pick an image. Using the meta description as a way to attract users to click on your link is a great idea whether the user is checking out a page you shared on Facebook or searching on Google.
Measure & Improve
Determine the effectiveness of your tweets and then try to improve on them. A lot of SEOs talk about trying to increase their click-through-rate in the search results and on their pages. You can also monitor the click-through-rate of your tweets. There is some helpful reading on this topic through Rand’s post on “Calculating and Improving Your Twitter Click-through-Rate” which may provide lots of ideas and guidelines about how to make improvements.
These are just a few for the many obtainable choices to help enhance your search engine rankings and social media sharing. By combining the tools of SEO with the social world could enable each of these areas to come together for a common purpose since they both have benefits to offer.
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