Social Media Marketing Resources to Optimize Your Search Ranking

Social media marketing involves a constellation of different digital marketing and search engine optimization approaches that are sometimes complex. Manual management of your marketing mix for SEO can be difficult, challenging, painstaking and sometimes impracticable. The good news is there are many social media marketing tools that you can use in order to escalate your SEO campaigns for better search ranking.

Getting social media into your digital marketing funnel

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Social media SEO has become an important element in every marketer’s digital marketing funnel. Writing good content is not good enough to benefit your business with maximum exposure online. Without using the social media search engine optimization process you will unlikely reach a wider audience for your content. Businesses often lag behind their competitor’s marketing sales because they failed to maximize their efforts in using the powerful influence of social media for building traffic and growing a website’s popularity online. For effective SEO using the social media platforms you need tools and resources to maximize results.

The advent of social media changes how the search engine algorithm ranks websites. It incorporates social signals when ranking sites for search that imposes a challenge among marketers on how to include it in their digital marketing funnel. But as you already know it is a MUST to integrate social media SEO if you want to get maximum exposure of your business with better lead generation and conversion results. To help you overcome the challenge of optimizing your business using social media SEO techniques, here are the best resources that will be helpful in this undertaking to make the task easier for you.

Your content is the meat of your digital marketing campaign. Your content drives your target audience to become more interested and to engage them efficiently to your business. It is through your content that you are able to communicate the importance of your business to the target consumers. Writing content is part of social media SEO as it helps drive traffic and engagement of your audience to your business. In order to help you write fresh and high quality content, here are some of the best resources that can help you:

• Search hot topics from Twitter and other social media networks that are trending and write about it. Chances are by writing your own version and insights about the topic you can draw the interest from other social media users that will drive more traffic to your content.
• Pick your topics wisely. To find relevant topics to your audience visit the social influencer’s profile and evaluate the kind of topics they post to their social media pages that seem to hook many followers and engaging them effectively.
• Be creative on how you publish content. Textual presentation is the norm but audiences always welcome more interesting and engaging ways that marketers communicate to them using infographics, videos and images.
• Try to deviate from the normal ways of writing content. Instead of writing “how to” articles consider writing about “How Not To” topics.
• Optimize the content with keywords. Long phrases are good for semantic search. Use Googel Keyword research tools for optimum results and to make the process easier for you.
• Unfortunately not all internet marketers are good writers. You are better off giving this task to the more competent ones by sourcing out the writing the content part of your content marketing structure to someone who is skilled in SEO writing.

Social sharing made easy

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Social shares provide the search engine with strong search signals that help boost your search engine optimization results. The more you can encourage your website visitors to share your business across the social media channels the better exposure your business gets. Here are helpful resources to help you grow your social signals quick and easy:

• Display the social sharing buttons such as the Facebook Like, Twitter buttons, Pinterest and Google + to your blog posts and other published content. This will encourage your audiences to share your content more easily across various social media channels.
• Use applications to connect your blog site to your social media accounts for automatic updates. There are applications such as that of Instagram that allows you to automatically share your posts to your Facebook and Twitter accounts seamlessly. You can easily spread the latest news and updates about your business to various channels at a single click of a button.
• Share others posts with the hope that they will share yours too. This can result in a symbiotic effect of promoting your site for organic traffic.
• Make social sharing easy using plugins. Content management systems like WordPress have vast resources that can make SEO easier and hassle free to its users using plugins.

Optimization for your images

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The social media channels involve personal connection and human engagement. Images can have a significant impact to your social media SEO as it promotes human engagement to your business and it builds personal relationship among people sharing the same interests. Optimizing your images for SEO can benefit your digital marketing campaigns with these tricks:

• Include alt text for your images. While internet users can easily identify an image the search engine bots are incapable of understanding what an image is all about unless it comes with a textual description. The alt text attribute of your images will give your image some meaning to the search engine for better targeted search results.
• Use clear and decent images of yourself or that of your business. Never use avatars as it removes the professional value that you can to promote for your business.
• Give your image a description for better optimization. Use target keywords for SEO purposes and to help rank your site for the search results.

Use authorship signature for social media marketing

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If there is one important source that you should use to boost your search ranking and reputation, it is using Google + in promoting your business. This platform is owned by Google and has become an important qualifier that the search engine uses when ranking websites for search. About 40% – 60% of the top websites appearing on the first search results page are Google + authored content.

• Set up your own Google + profile and optimize the information and image requirements before you can start using the platform. Follow the basic SEO tips provided above for optimizing your images.
• Link your published content back to your Google + profile by using Google. You can find your Google plus profile URL from the browser tab. Simply copy and paste it to the link above and you are ready to go. If you have a blog site you need to associate it to your Google + account by providing its detail to your account in Google +.

 Track, measure and analyze your social media SEO progress

Getting a feedback from your SEO performance is crucial for an effective and successful social media SEO. You will need apps and tools for this purpose and the following come highly recommended: 

• Google Analytics tool can help measure various social media metrics that will give you clearer insights about your traffic sources and the best pages that are generating better engagement to your audience.
• Buffer helps in optimizing your social media sharing and gives you better feedback about your audience reach.
• Google Webmaster tool is similar to the analytics tool but it also provides a baseline tool to measure your SEO performance and provide actionable data on how to further optimize your campaigns.
• Rank checker tool for Firefox is a good ranking tool that you can use if you are fond of using Firefox. The tool allows you to check for your website’s ranking hassle free.
• Shared Count is a tool that can provide report on how many shares your content already has.

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