Social Media SEO, is Your Business Web 2.0 Compatible?

The world is constantly changing, and nowhere is this happening faster than the Internet. One growing trend is the number of people taking advantage of social media to promote their businesses and products. Yet so many people have trouble understanding how social media can benefit them, particularly in small to medium sized businesses where budgets are tight and time is a rare commodity you can’t afford to waste. If you have heard people talk of Twitter, blogs, Youtube and Facebook but have no idea how this would fit into the context of your industry and business, then read on! This post will reveal how some simple, free (and, quite honestly … fun!) tactics can be used to really enhance your search engine optimisation (SEO) and business profile on the web and how you can ensure your time is spent effectively.

 

How Blogs Can Work for Your Business

An increasing number of people are blogging for business, why? Well, firstly search engines love rolling content and news pages. Unlike static web pages, the benefit of a news or blog section comes from the regularly updated content and steady stream of informative articles. The great part is you can write about anything that takes your fancy, provided it is somehow related to your industry, business or products. Although you may not realise, you probably have a wealth of knowledge which the average Joe Public would need to do some serious Wiki-ing to unearth. By gradually releasing little bits of this knowledge on a regular basis, you will give search engines a very good reason to see you as an authoritative source of news and will quickly find your articles ranking well for related search terms. Blogs can be used to announce the launch of your new products, perhaps offer a review and some customer feedback or advice, or it might cover events happening in your industry or even company news. Whatever your niche, try to think about your customers and imagine what type of information they would find useful. Provided you can think of at least one type of person who would be moderately interested, you should write it!

Blogging Opens the Twitter Door

Once you are comfortable adding to your blog, the next logical step is building up your company’s official Twitter account. Twitter is so easy to use and so effective at promoting websites that some people often accuse it of being one giant spam machine. The goal is finding as many genuine followers as possible, each of who will see any updates you post. You can post short snippets of news, or links to articles in your blog. Each time you add a new blog entry, be sure to copy and paste the address of your new post into your Twitter update bar with a little text describing the article. It becomes a source of clicks for people who are interested in the headline, and there are some fantastic Twitter applications appearing that will help kick-start and manage your account. Twittgeek.com will automatically follow people based on a keyword you choose. The great thing about this is that it ensures your message reaches people who have Tweeted about this topic in the past and are most likely to be interested in what you have to say.

Social Media SEO, Social Bookmarking and Article Back-links

There are some great sites out there besides Twitter that you should be submitting each article to, instead of building links for your site itself, you will be building links for your individual articles. Each site has a certain ‘knack’ to really get the most out of your social media SEO, but all are very easy to pick up and you will often find you get used to them by simply using them. A lot of SEO experts will slate digg.com because ‘power users really need to digg your article to really feel a big effect, but there are other advantages – Digg articles themselves will often rank very quickly in Google separately from your site, and when enough people click through from your Digg entry through to your actual blog entry, eventually Google will see it should be recommending your blog page high up, and will often ‘flip’ the URLs, giving you a chance to rank for some quite competitive terms if your article is an interesting enough read. Reddit.com entries will generally not rank very well in Google, but has a fantastic number of users and does not insist on categories, allowing it to become a neat little traffic source all of it’s own. Be sure to give your articles a full description here in the ‘extra text’ section. You can submit either blog entries or entire sites to Stumble Upon, and it is worth finding several relevant categories for your article if you can! There are other generic social bookmarking sites such as delicious.com, diigo.com, Yahoo Bookmarks and Google Bookmarks that are worth using.

Making Facebook and Youtube Work For you

Facebook now allows organisations and companies to open up official Facebook accounts. This is something else that is quick to do, and quite a lot of fun. Be sure to make all employees are members of the group, so that all can contribute to your Facebook profile. Also, be sure to link back to your site and post any links to articles here too! Similarly, some may find themselves in industries where they have videos that might be uploaded to Youtube. Remember, that plenty of people use YouTube on a regular basis, and it would be worth including a link back to your site from the description of each YouTube video you post. You can also embed videos from YouTube into your site fairly easily.

Why Social Media is Best Done Yourself

In a nutshell, there are some more expensive SEO companies who will provide the social media side of SEO as part of the service. But my advice would be that social media SEO is something best done yourself. Why? Well, only you have the industry insider knowledge and deal with your customers on a regular basis, and will therefore understand them better than any SEO consultant. It is also completely free to do your social media SEO, and allocating just one hour each day, or perhaps a couple of hours each week is enough to really see a noticeable impact on your SEO.

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