Let’s face it, social media is an essential part of ensuring your company ranks with Google.  Now is the time to assess your social media and SEO practices and make sure you have a streamlined unified approach.  And as the web evolves, social media will continue to become more and more important. Soon, there may not be a definitive division between social and non-social interactions online. The fact is, social media is the key to digital marketing efforts.

What does this mean for your business? It means that you don’t have time to question whether you should be using social media as part of your marketing mix. The days of questioning the value of social media as a “marketing tool” are past, you need to embrace social media as a central element of your marketing today.

SEO is no longer just focused on keywords and inbound website links. Search engines are now looking at social signals from social media channels to validate credibility. We expect search engines to increase their reliance on social signals as the social web evolves. With these social signals playing a bigger role, it’s time to address how you can be more social with SEO in mind.

Tips to maximize your SEO with Social Media Marketing:

1. Publish Quality Content For SEO

Quality content is in our opinion, the most important part of your social media and SEO strategy. Now don’t get me wrong, quality content alone is not going to drive your sales, but it is a major key for any solid digital marketing strategy that is trying to leverage organic search as a part of the equation.

It’s important to note that quality over quantity is important. Google continues to push for quality and for good reason. Search engines do not want repeat content that is cut and pasted from another website, or  “guest” posts that are published on multiple websites. Remember, your content cannot only be focused on SEO. Incorporating as many  SEO keywords as possible will not keep your readers’ attention and it will hurt your rankings as Google is smart and they know when you are “stuffing” keywords into your content. You need to write for your audience and include keywords smoothly. It’s both an art and a science.

Think of it this way, the better content you produce the more excited people will be to connect with you and more likely they will be to do business with you. People are also more willing to share a really great blog post with others which will drive more people to your website. Finally, really great content is often linked to by other websites which gives you the in-bound links that are so valuable for SEO. Content really is king and will continue to be in the future.

2. Include Social Share Buttons For SEO

You want your content to be shared. Make it easy for people to share it by incorporating social share buttons on your blog and website. You want to make sure your share buttons are set to include your company name, URL and hashtags. This is part of what search engines are looking for with social signals. We personally like share buttons that have counters attached to show others how many people are interacting and sharing the blog post. People tend to share more often when they see others are sharing too.

3. Optimize Images For SEO

Optimizing your images on social media channels and on your blog is an important and powerful SEO approach that most people miss.  Optimizing images for SEO means using keywords to fill in metadata, title and alternative title. You want to fill in all these fields every time you publish a photo on your website and/or blog. On social media channels, make sure when possible to share the photos with keywords, hashtags and URLs  and/or information about the photo.

4. Social Media Strategy For SEO

It is not enough to simply share your content on your social media channels and hope it goes viral. The real work in social media marketing and SEO comes with your social media strategy. Having a sound strategy that includes building a community that is engaged and cares about your company and product is essential. Leveraging advertising both on Facebook, Google Ads and perhaps other channels such as Instagram is also an important part of the strategy. This is an ongoing process which needs to be adjusted and constantly managed. A set it and forget mentality will not work. Getting free advertising  by posting your Facebook page will not work either. To be competitive in today’s marketplace you need to have a viable social media / digital marketing strategy in place.

Looking for more ways to improve your social media and SEO strategy? Contact SocialNicole for a consultation today!

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It can be easy to ignore excellent plugins on WordPress. Sometimes you just want to write a damn blog post and move on with your day. But Yoast isn’t something to overlook. WordPress SEO by Yoast is a fantastic tool, yet it won’t do you much good if you don’t know how to use it well. Here’s an SEO tutorial that should help you with that: First, the WHY: Yoast is a plugin that makes sure you have your SEO ducks in a row.

Having your SEO ducks in a row means that your post, with all the work you put into it, is worth your while. Optimized content is what will help drive traffic to your website and therefore your product/service/message. The time you spend with Yoast will absolutely be rewarded. So let’s get started!

Finding a keyword

The first step to using Yoast for a blog post is finding a keyword that fits. You can use a phrase, too, so you could say “toothbrush” or “toothbrush best practices,” and they would both work. To choose a good keyword, read over your blog post. What message are you trying to get across? Think of a couple of reasons why you wrote it. If your blog post is about flossing your teeth, you might come up with the following ideas:

• Flossing
• Oral care
• Gingivitis prevention

You may not even mention gingivitis in your post, but as the writer of a post like this, you know that flossing’s greater purpose isn’t to make your gums bleed–it’s to promote oral care. Beginning to think like this will help with your keyword-finding endeavors. If you need help searching for ideas, you can also use a word cloud tool for your post. After you have these ideas written down, go to Google Adwords. Sign in and under the Tools tab on the far right, select “Keyword Planner” from the dropdown menu. With this planning tool, you can type in some of the ideas you’ve already written down. Google will tell you what people are searching for related to that keyword. You want to try to find a balance between Low competition and a High number of monthly searches.

TIP: While sometimes unavoidable, try to steer clear of keywords that have apostrophes in them or other similar punctuation. If your keyword is “Alzheimer’s”, that apostrophe may goof up the optimization. If you can go with something like “dementia” instead, you might be more successful.

When coming up with your keyword, remember that this word or phrase will have to be used with some frequency in your post. If you think the keyword sounds starchy or something you don’t think works for your post, don’t use it! It may take some time to come up with a good keyword, and this is okay. This is probably the hardest part of using Yoast–the prep beforehand. [Tweet “It helps to come up with keyword ideas with Google Adwords before you even begin writing your blog post.”]

The circle of SEO

Yoast makes it easy to tell if you’re doing it right. After installing the plugin, you will begin noticing a small circle indicating how well optimized the post is for your keyword. You want that circle to be green. Right now this circle is gray because I have not typed in my keyword yet. If I type in a keyword and the dot turns red, that means I’ve not very well optimized the post. If it turns yellow, it’s “meh” and finally, green is gold!

TIP: If your circle isn’t changing color even as you make changes, go ahead and save the draft of your post to get it to refresh.

For this post, I’ve decided to use the keyword “SEO tutorial.” Although this post is about Yoast, its greater purpose is to optimize your blog post or article, so this keyword fits well. Be sure to not mislead your readers by using a keyword that isn’t really relevant to your content. This is considered a grave sin in the land of Google, and you SHALL be penalized.

Yoast it up

Scrolling down in WordPress past the main copy of your blog post, you will find your Yoast plugin. This is where the magic happens. Below is my plugin all filled in with my keyword. You can do as much or as little of it as you want, but I usually choose to do all of them. The snippet preview here is what will come up on the Google results list. The meta description is a little summary or hook that shows up on the snippet. If you do not put in a meta description, it will default to the first 156 characters of the beginning of your post. Refreshing my post now as I write this draft, my circle is green! Yay! I’m all done, right? I could be, especially if I’m in a rush. But there is more to Yoast. And that’s the “Page Analysis” tab. There are many tips on here, but for the sake of your time and mine, I’ve boxed three tips that help your SEO but have nothing to do with your keyword. The first box, the one about the slug, is referring to your URL. Yoast thinks my slug is too long. Yoast can bug off–I like my slug! That’s another thing–Yoast has tips and suggestions for you, but you do not have to make sure all the dots are green. You can take or leave any advice given to you. The second box there is about the Flesch Reading Ease test. I will not claim expertise on this test, but it basically determines if your copy is hard to read or not. If it’s hard to read, that doesn’t mean nobody will read it, but that definitely means fewer people will read it. Ease of reading comes with shorter sentences, non-jargon or non-pretentious vocabulary and shorter paragraphs. And finally, I have two outbound links in my post. This tells Google that I’m referencing other articles, which encourages engagement and interaction online. This practice has nothing to do with my keyword, but Google has the power to reward certain behaviors while writing a post, outbound links being one of them!

Boom, Yoasted.

Now that you’ve optimized your post, you can enjoy more traffic to your website in the coming months. Have fun Yoasting and let us know how it goes! — Photo Credit

Social media is quickly becoming a major player in search engine optimization. We’ve explained how it works, and how it affects your business.  As the web evolves, social media is positioned to become even more important. Soon, there may not be a definitive division between social and non-social interactions online. The fact is, social media is the key to digital marketing efforts. What does this mean for your business? It means that you don’t have time to question whether you should be on social media. With social media beginning to affect your search engine ranking, you need to embrace it. It is not always clear to marketers and business owners how social media impacts search engine optimization. Therefore, tyring to align your efforts can be challenging. SEO is no longer focused on keywords and inbound website links. Search engines are now looking at social signals from Facebook, Google+, Twitter and others to validate credibility. We expect search engines to increase their reliance on social signals as the social web evolves. With these social signals playing a bigger role, it’s time to address how you can be more social with SEO in mind. Here are some tips:

1. Publish Quality Content

Content continues to be an important part of any SEO strategy. But quality over quantity is important. Google continues to push for quality. Search engines do not want repeat content that is cut and pasted from another website, or  “guest” posts that are published on multiple websites. Remember, your content cannot only be focused on SEO. Incorporating as many  SEO keywords as possible will not keep your readers’ attention and it will hurt your rankings as Google is smart and they know when you are “stuffing” keywords into your content. You need to write for your audience and include keywords smoothly. It’s both an art and a science.

2. Include Social Share Buttons on your Blog

You want your content to be shared. Make it easy for people to share it by incorporating social share buttons on your blog. You want to make sure your share buttons are set to include your company name, URL and hashtags. This is part of what search engines are looking for with social signals. Looking to create your own buttons? Each social media platform allows you to create your own buttons and install the code on your website The best approach is hardcoding, which will make your pages load faster. If you are on a tighter budget and using WordPress, there are some great plugins that can make social sharing rather simple. Our favorites are Share This and Shareaholic.

3. Optimize Images

Optimizing your images on social media channels and on your blog is an important and powerful SEO approach that most people miss. On your blog, that means using keywords to fill in metadata, title and alternative title. On social media channels, optimize the photos you load with keywords, hashtags and URLs  and/or information about the photo. This comes back to the art and science of SEO writing. You don’t want photos to seem focused on SEO, but you can often write a description that includes SEO elements. Keep this in mind each time you post a photo.

4. Google Authorship

Google Authorship is an essential part of your social and blog SEO. It will add credibility to your content. If you have multiple authors, setup each of them on your blog with authorship. You can read more about this process here.

Looking for more ways to improve your social media and SEO strategy? Contact SocialNicole for a consultation today!

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