5 SEO Best Practices to Boost Social Media Including Common Misconceptions. SEO is challenging, complicated and confusing but vitally Important. Here are five social media best practices shown to effectively boost your SEO. View original post at: https://blog.dlvrit.com/2015/03/boost-social-media-seo/

1. 5 BEST Social Media Practices to Boost SEO
blog.dlvrit.com/2015/03/boost-social-media-seo/
Debra Garber
The truth is, SEO is challenging and can be difficult for most small business
owners to understand. In addition to being extremely complicated, SEO best
practices often change as Google continuously tweaks the rules of the game.
However, in today’s digital world, your social media marketing strategies and SEO
should not be treated as two independent marketing silos – regardless of how
complicated. They should be viewed as two tightly interwoven puzzle pieces in
your marketing plan. Pair them together like you would wine and cheese or
strawberries and cream or bread and butter (you get the drift). Both equally
important to enhance the other. The confusing part, if you ask ten different
people in online marketing whether social media impacts SEO, you’ll get ten
different answers.

2. SEO is Challenging, Complicated and Confusing but Vitally
Important
Since social media relies on high-quality content and a visible,
strong brand presence, the efforts you spend on SEO can
seriously improve your social media reach, and as most search
marketers will tell you, your social media presence can greatly
increase your search rankings.
Here’s a list of five social media practices from Forbes that are shown to
effectively boost your SEO.
Practice #1: Organically grow your number of QUALITY fans and
followers
Why is this important? A common misconception
The total number of followers and connections your social media profiles contain
does have a significant influence on your rankings. However, Google can detect
the quality of your followers, meaning buying 100,000 proxy Twitter followers
isn’t going to do much for your overall rankings. Instead, you’ll need to build your
following organically.
How to do this? (Hint: Through Content, Conversations and
Immediate Response)

3. 1. Create Compelling Content
Content keeps giving. When you provide content to your fans, they can help you
extend its reach by sharing it with their followers. If the content is good, people will
share it frequently and your fan base can grow rapidly.
Examples of most shared content:
Something they like or recommend, such as products, services, movies,
and books
News items
Links to websites
Reposts from other people’s social media posts
Video clips
2. Have a Conversation
Fans and followers want to engage with your brand. Reach out. Strike up a
conversation. Remember this – happy fans retweet and share.
Examples of what to post:
Useful articles
Helpful tips
Open inquiries
General discussion items
Then, follow up with your users by directly engaging them in conversation.
Conversations and direct customer engagements are the key to
building and retaining a sizable, interactive following, since they
encourage current followers to return and help build your authority
for new, potential followers.
3. Answer Customer’s Questions – Immediately

4. Research queries by Lithium resulted in 72% of customer’s siting immediacy of
response as critical when they have a question – a majority of these responders
say immediacy means, “less than an hour”. Not surprisingly, immediacy pays off.
From the study,
One-third reported being likely to buy more from the company;
43% are likely to encourage friends and family to buy the company’s
products;
4 in 10 are more receptive to the brands’ ads;
4 in 10 are willing to praise or recommend the brand through social media.
Read: SEO & E-Commerce: 5 Ways to Ensure Your Products are Visible in
Organic Search by Art Enke
Practice #2: Welcome and encourage external links
Why is this important?
Many top SEOs agree that getting external links is the single most important
means of attaining high rankings. As external links are one of the hardest metrics
to manipulate, they are one of the best ways for search engines to determine the
popularity of a given web page.
In the opinion of the Moz blog (see Moz’s graphic below), external links are more
influential than internal links.
Top SEOs believe that external links are the most important source of
ranking power.
External links pass “link juice” (ranking power) differently than internal
links because the search engines consider them as third-party votes.

5. How to do this?
1. Publish GREAT content on your website
2. Improve your social reputation as an authoritative leader
Use hashtags to gain visibility
Don’t hesitate to bring your content into existing threads and discussions
3. Build your local reputation by encouraging online reviews
Practice #3: Optimize your posts for searches
Why is that important?
Google tends to favor popular social media updates in the top sections of its
search engine results pages (SERPs). It’s a key, somewhat temporary, position
you can attain by making sure your posts are optimized for the opportunity.

6. How to do this?
1. Optimize keywords throughout your post. Keyword research is essential for
on page optimization.
Make sure your content is written for humans. Think quality first. If you have
a WordPress site, check your keyword ratio with Scribe.
Pack your content with useful facts, statistics and dates.
Limit the repetitiveness of keywords in Alt tags, title and image captions.
2. Optimize your images. Whenever you upload a photo to your blog, be sure to
include keywords in the file name and fill out the alternate text field with a brief,
keyword rich, description of the photo.
Pro tip: If there is one thing to remember when queuing up an image, it is the
aspect ratio. The general rule of thumb is to keep the aspect ratio of an image
at 2:1.
Great reads:
5 Tips to Craft a Meta Description that Drives Clicks from Google
How to Avoid an SEO Penalty with Google Analytics Alerts
How to Create Rich Tweets by using Auto-Preview of Images and Videos
Practice #4: Influence Social Sharing
Why is this important?
Social sharing contributes to a brand’s authority much in the same way that
external links do. To search engines like Google, any indication of a verifiable
external source validating your brand or your content is grounds for a small
improvement in domain authority. Likes, shares, favorites, replies, and retweets
all count toward this increased authority.
How to do this?
The best way to encourage increased social sharing is to appeal to it directly.
Offer a specific reward for people sharing your post (like entry in a drawing

7. for a substantial prize).
Do an interactive survey, which encourages people to “like” a post if they
agree with you on an issue, or if they’re interested in seeing specific types
of new content.
Most importantly: Pay close attention to Millennials. Millennials are twice as
likely to purchase products they share about.
Millennials are highly active, influential, cross-device, channel-
agnostic sharers. They share more often, and in turn are more likely
to be listened to: millennials users are 3.6x more likely to share
content on social networks, and 2.3x more likely to click back on
content shared by their peers.

8. Practice #5: Increase Brand awareness
Why is this important?
This may seem like more of a branding advantage than a specific SEO advantage,
but the SEO benefit is significant. For the most part, these are staple elements of a
successful social media marketing campaign, and as with most SEO strategies, it
comes down to one basic principle: the better experience you give your users,
the higher you’re going to rank in Google.
How to do this?
It’s simple. (Well, not really.) But if you follow the advice from the four previous
points, you’re bound to be one step ahead in increasing your brand awareness
and ultimately, opening the widest possible channel for new potential customers to
find you.
Recap: Key ways to BOOST social media SEO:
1. Create Compelling Content
2. Have a Conversation
3. Answer Customer’s Questions – Immediately
4. Publish GREAT content on your website
5. Improve your social reputation as an authoritative leader
6. Build your local reputation by encouraging online reviews
7. Optimize keywords throughout your post
8. Optimize your images
9. Influence social sharing
10. Pay attention to Millennials – they are your influencers