How To Develop An SEO Strategy With Social Media Campaigns
March 7, 2013 - 4 minutes read - Blog, SEO, Social MediaMany Americans couldn’t imagine life without social sharing sites like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter. Especially now that we can access these sites on our mobile devices, social media has really woven itself into the fabric of our daily lives. Successful businesses innately understand this simple fact, which is why most companies have a presence on at least one social media site. Yet, it’s all too easy to get lost in the sea of posts and wonder, “Is anyone seeing this? What am I really doing here?” The secret to getting more bang for your buck out of social media is this: SEO strategy.
Social Media SEO Strategy
Most commonly, we use social media to share content from our WordPress blogs. So much SEO work must be done there, first and foremost. The “search” functionality for social media sites is still rather primitive, but we can expect all that to change over the next few years. Facebook has partnered with Bing to improve their search capabilities, for instance. (It’s amazing what the new Facebook Graph Search has uncovered!) So you will need to think about titles, images, and including a few keywords in your social posts too.
Keyword Analysis: The Core Component of SEO Strategy
Which terms are people searching to find products and brands like yours?
It pays to invest time, effort and money into effective keyword research, since this will be the basis for ALL your other online marketing. These keywords will appear on your website, in your ads, on your social media pages, and in PPC ads. Commonly, businesses pick keywords that are too obvious or too broad. If you’re a small car dealership, you can’t expect to compete with highly competitive keywords like “used car” or “car sales.” Instead, you might target “Prius Overland Park KS” — something a bit longer and more specific to your location. Remember, you want “low/medium competition” and “high search volume” (200+/month). You will also want to know which keywords your competitors are using to chip into their business a little.
Places For SEO
- Title Tag – Put keywords in the title tag of your homepage and all sub-pages. Vary which title tags you use and keep them limited to 70 characters or less. Don’t over-stuff your keywords and keep these phrases unique.
- Meta Description – There should be a description written for each page, which includes an enticing, informative message with at least one keyword and a call-to-action.
- Alternative Image Text – Use your most important keywords in the “ALT TEXT” box..
Blogs – Use a main keyword and several additional keyword phrases in each blog post. You want it to sound natural and write for your audience, first and foremost. We use keywords no more than 4 times per post to avoid being filtered out as a “spam” post.
URLs – Make your URLs short and memorable, but keyword-rich. Do not let WordPress just assign you anything.
Also keep in mind that there are back-end adjustments web design experts can make that will greatly impact how easily search bots can “crawl” your site (and rank you!) We can clean up the programming language, get rid of dated FLASH and JavaScript, and improve the organization of your site structure to improve your ranking virtually overnight.
