Best Practices for Social Media Searches
You have a web presence and you need it to allow others to find you. That means that you need to optimize your presence with keywords and phrases and you need to share (and syndicate) large amounts of content.
With the challenge of optimizing your online content effectively, you are also going to be faced with the fact that you may encounter more obstacles in the way of your success as well. One thing that is for certain is that you need to recognize the importance of both search engine optimization and the level of social interaction for your business. It is very important to examine your online offerings and how they relate to the searches that other people perform in order to find you. First of all, you will have a couple of goals that need to be met right away:
- You need to get your offerings to rank higher on the search engines
- You need to get your website to rank higher on the search engines
There is no question that the number of people connecting and interacting through social media channels has increased tremendously. This means the number of unique visitors as well as return visitors. The analytics (any analytics program that you choose to use) will tell you the same thing. Searches on social media channels and searches for particular individuals are two distinct areas where there is continued and steady growth. They make up the majority of the traffic that is generated. Outside of that, specific brands are also becoming a stronger and stronger source of traffic. These sources are causing a very high volume of traffic to be driven to Twitter, Facebook, and other websites. More and more people are checking out numerous products and services online all of the time.
Getting your pages to have higher rankings
It is important to understand that the more valuable information you share, the more other people will pay attention to you and your offerings and the more they pay attention, the more they will eventually be inclined to buy from you. Clearly, your position in your website as a result of someone searching for you is at the top; however, you also want to increase your rankings when it comes to the search engines. Of course, there are measures that you can take in order to make this happen.
- Put a link to your homepage: When it comes to the way that search engines identify information, having a link in your content that leads back to your homepage is taken seriously. Remember, the placement of your links is important. You don’t want to seem as though you are being shamelessly self-promoting but at the same time, you need to provide a viable connection to your business. The last thing that you want to do is to miss golden opportunities for business.
- Put your brand names in your content: This is an excellent idea when it comes to search engines. You should include information on your company and the names of your products and services. You want to make sure that you get the maximum benefit out of your content that will lead to the success of your business.
- Get people to “Like” your offerings: The search engines notice “Likes” that you get from other people. In fact, they like them as much as they like links. It is fairly easy to get people to “Like” what you are sharing and it will definitely benefit your business. If you consistently post valuable and educational content, people will be willing to express their appreciation in that way.
Sharing user-friendly tools
Your goal is to get people to interact with you and to continue to share their thoughts and feelings about your business offerings. With that in mind, it is important to make it as simple as possible for other people to be able to interact with you. If the tools that you use to allow them to do that are easy, they will be far more inclined to jump in. They will come to you if it is fun and easy. One of your options is to offer social interaction plugins on your website so that with a click of the button, they will be connected to you.
Conclusion
Social media and search capabilities go hand in hand. It is critical that you think about them as synergistic. They are far more effective for your business together than each one is by itself. People need a way to find you so that they can start to build a relationship with you. If you are not able to think in that way, you are doing your business and yourself a disservice. Always keep best practices at the top of your mind and use them consistently and let them be your driver when it comes to how you do business.
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Group: ForbesWoman
Discussion: Best Practices for Social Media Searches
You are right. Let’t take our Linkedin profiles for example. Placement of your keywords and talents throughout the summary, work experience and recommendations areas are extremely important. So is having your keywords appear in the text box that appears when someone scrolls over your picture. Finally, complete everything if you want to be found in the search.
Posted by Ilya Kushnirskiy