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the Free CMSWire NewsletterSocial media strategists are often separated from the SEO and web teams. This is unfortunate because they seek the same goals — awareness of the website and engagement with the audience. SEO has evolved as a sophisticated but largely separate discipline from social media and community development. As a result the social media strategist is often left out of the loop when it comes to SEO best practices.
To remedy this problem we’ve put together a list of basic SEO concepts and how they are impacted by social media. Incorporate these simple concepts into the fabric of how your social teams work. Make sure your SEO teams understand why the social teams are interested in their work. They’re not looking to take over — they’re looking to boost the effectiveness and output of SEO.
An Image is Worth a Thousand Keywords
Pictures = good. Social strategies for boosting site rank can significantly benefit from having others doing the work for you. Create incentives that engage and entice customers, employees and business partners to generate unique content. Images and snapshots work well. They’re easy to take and upload with the hyper-ubiquity of phone cameras. Create an easy way for users to upload and share their images of them doing stuff with your product to your site.
Free and cheap examples include promoting a Twitter hash tag (e.g., #bloomthink) for user photos or encouraging photo sharing via Facebook and your company tag. More advanced examples include soliciting customer or partner photos uploaded to your website. Then have a gallery where users can view their pictures and those of others. Yes, make sure you have someone responsible for curating those photos. That is simple common sense.
“There's Your Expert” Creative Commons Attribution
A Strong Relationship is Worth Even More
Create a zone of exclusivity where influencers and experts are incented to share their thoughts, designs and advice with your audience on your web property. Social is sharing. And sharing is two-way. Make sure that the incentives you provide are real and impactful. They don’t need to break the bank, but they should be note-worthy. When you are remarkable, people tend to remark. That is exactly the behavior you desire. When you engage users and influencers, you spur their promotion of your site as well.
A word of warning here is to keep it unique. Buying into the whole content farm concept can be a risky proposition (content farming is the simple aggregation of buzz-wordy artifacts like blog articles, images and tweets. No unique content or value was created). It worked for a while, but search engines got wise and changed up the algorithms to prioritize original and unique content over content farms. Ideas on how to do this abound online.
Gamification — a recent social buzzword — has a big role to play in this space. By providing incentives — whether credibility ratings, badges for collection, points that can be redeemed or peer accolades — you spur engagement. Hotels and airlines have been doing this for some time with their points-based loyalty programs. By providing that incentive, outlining the path to achievement and explaining the rewards, they not only gain the loyalty of a customer, they also foster a relationship that extends their reach and provides valuable constructively critical feedback when things start to go wrong.
Do the Pre-Work and It Pays Off
Scalable link building is a strategy that really impacts your SEO. This is the idea of doing link swapping with others in your conceptual, topical or solution ecosystem. Some of this is pure grind, and there is no substitute for hard work. You need to contact webmasters of complementary sites and mar/com departments of complementary companies and build those relationships, do the link swaps and host each other’s content. Start with your partners. You already have a relationship there. When you promote their success, you implicitly promote your own success.
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