Abstract: A look at some key points for utilising Social Media for SEO purposes targeted towards small businesses, organizations and sole traders.
Intended Audience: Small Business Owners/webmasters and anyone new to the world of web design and search engine optimization (SEO) particularly those working with small businesses, organizations and sole traders.
Small Businesses and Sole Traders should consider Social Media SEO because it is an SEO strategy that can be undertaken by a small business without significant cost and it can be used and reused to create backlinks and deep-links to a website.
If you create a link, tag, article, profile, link, tag, article or other content on a Social Media website, other users of that website can view your submission and your submission may also be listed on Google and the other search engines.
If the visitors to your content like your submission they may click on the link to your website thus gaining you valuable traffic and potential customers. This is how you can obtain organic traffic for your website from your submissions to Social Media websites. Organic traffic is important as it is targeted and more like likely to offer good conversion rates and also has the possibility of attracting repeat clients as you update and post new content on the various Social Media websites.
When using a Social Media SEO strategy content is very important and needs to be balanced between content that is rich with your key-phrases as well as being interesting to viewers. Remember one of the objectives of a Social Media Strategy is to bring visitors to your website and this won’t be achieved without interesting and relevant content.
When you submit content to a social media website make sure that it links back to your website so search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo can index the link. This will create a back-link to your website. Some Social Media websites try and block this link creation though use of the nofollow rel attribute but remember even these submissions may bring traffic to your website.
Another important point to remember when creating Social Media back-links is to make sure that all the links do not go to your home page. Some of the back-links you create should link to other pages on your website. These types of links are referred to as deep links or deep back-links.
The more back-links you have from different Social Media websites the more likely it is that the search engines will start to view your website as important and your website will start to move up in their search page results.
So, the benefits from a Social Media strategy are from people who visit your site from these websites, but also from increased search engine ranking generated from the back-links that you created on those websites. A Social Strategy SEO Strategy requires some effort but the benefits are tangible and well worth the trouble for most small businesses.
