How Social Media Can Help Kick-Start Your SEO

In practice, if you play by the Google Webmasters Guidelines to the letter of the law, then you will probably find that it does not get you anywhere fast and you give up and start to take short-cuts. This is where social media comes in and can help you get those much needed ‘earned links’.

Earned links

Earned links are the most valuable – these are natural links from third parties who feel that your content provides value, is useful and relevant.

Gaining earned links is not easy when you are starting out as it is not easy to get your content creation efforts under the noses of those who might be willing to link to you. In the early days of a website, when you do not have much of a direct audience on your own site, you need to leverage social media to get the ‘marketing flywheel’ spinning. One of the best ways to get things happening is to use social media to promote your content.

So, let’s say you have spent a day crafting a really interesting blog which perhaps includes an infographic. If you were to just follow the Google school of thought, that would be all you would do and you would comply with their set of rules. However, unless your site was established and had traffic you would probably find that your efforts might not get picked-up or generate much in the way of links.

However, if you have spent some time building up a Twitter, Facebook and Google+ following, you have something to share with your audience here. Provided you are engaging with the right people and in the right way, you will soon find that people are sharing and linking to your content. Also, the better quality and longer-form content you produce, the more likely people will link to it and share it. Plus, another great thing about long-form content is that people will generally spend more time on the site which is a measurement Google looks at when determining relevance.

So, some quick points for you….

• Invest in creating the best quality and ideally long-form content – this makes it more linkable and shareable, but also keeps users on your site for longer!
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• Building a social audience costs nothing but your time and can help you get those valuable earned links, so don’t be afraid to spend some time here as it will help with your SEO efforts until your site becomes established.
• Make sure your content is easily shareable, think about title lengths, where your sharing buttons are and which ones are likely to be relevant to your audience and market.
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• Finally, don’t be afraid to reach-out via social media and ask people to share your content – provided it is useful and relevant, most people will be happy to help if you do it the right way.

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