Ways to Link Social and SEO
Companies expend amazing amounts of time and resources on social media marketing. But it’s clear to me that one simple fact is constantly lacking in their strategies and tactics – SEO. That fact is that success in social, especially for B2B companies, is very often realized through search.
Tips how you use all those target terms, links, and hashtags in your social media marketing.
Choose your target terms much as you would do with SEO.
You can hardly expect your social media managers to optimize your content with high-value keywords if they don’t even know what those keywords are. The list needs to be relatively short – unless you’re an e-commerce site with literally thousands of products, focus on the top 50 to 100 most popular and relevant terms. If your list is too long you will be watering down the effectiveness of your SEO program by spreading yourself too thin.
Google’s keyword selection tool is a great resource for this and it’s free.
Choose target pages on your site that have good content and may be already ranking on the first couple pages of Google and match those pages to the keywords you want them to appear under. Keep in mind that not all pages will map neatly to one of your target terms. In many cases you may be matching target terms with your home page, services pages, or other general pages. When you use the term try to link to that page and use the term as the anchor or link text.
Identify all the hashtags being used around relevant conversations on Twitter.
Sure, it’s good to make up your own hashtags. However, it can often be better to utilize existing hashtags to access the conversations your prospects and customers are already having.
Create a worksheet with a list of target terms, Twitter hashtags, and the URLs you should be trying to link to when you use those target terms in social content. Now here’s the key thing: they should be using this list and worksheet in an opportunistic way. In other words, they don’t have to be playing a Boggle word game trying to figure out how to use these terms and links. They should be using them when it makes sense from a contextual and grammatical standpoint.
Use your target terms, hashtags, and links opportunistically in your tweets. Also remember that people don’t just see the tweets from the people and companies they’re following. They also search in Twitter using specific keywords.Tweets do get indexed in Google!
Facebook posts
Use target terms and links in your Facebook posts, if you have a public fan page. Google is indexing your posts and they are showing up in search results.
Use your target terms and links in your LinkedIn and posts.
Use your target terms and links in your blog titles and copy. It’s especially important to utilize your links in the first few sentences of your blog post since other bloggers who subscribe to your RSS feeds and republish your posts often abridge and truncate them and then link back to your blog post.
Use your target terms and links in the press releases you drop on the wire services. As with your blog posts, utilize your links in the first two sentences since sites and bloggers that republish press releases often abridge and truncate them and link back to the wire services version of the press release.
Use your target terms and links in all of your content posting descriptions. This includes your Facebook about profile, video titles and descriptions in YouTube, presentation titles and descriptions in SlideShare, image titles and descriptions in Flickr and Pinterest, PDF postings, and Docstoc.
Make sure that all the valuable content on your site including images, charts, graphs, white papers, and videos are socially enabled. What do I mean by that? I mean that you have big noisy share buttons that encourage people to post your content to their social sites.
Make sure to configure your share copy so it utilizes high-value keywords. Don’t let the share buttons automatically grab images and copy from your page. Tell your web developers that you want to control what the share copy says when someone hits the share button on your site.
Tell bloggers it’s OK to grab your images, charts, graphs, and other content as long as they link back to your site. In fact, encourage them to do so.