5 Winning Strategies To Harness Social Media For SEO


As any Web Development Company will tell you, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is one of the best ways to organically drive traffic to your website and gain more business.
A big part of SEO is building up quality backlinks to your website. This however, can be a tricky game at times. It is highly important that you keep up to date and inline with Google’s latest guidelines. Google’s rules change regularly and to have the best SEO rankings for your website you must follow these carefully.

To yield the best results, link building should be a natural process and this is how Social Media comes into action – Allowing you to connect with specific business sectors and build relationships with contacts within the industries you are targeting.

Below are 5 ways to start earning quality backlinks:

1.Posting on Social News Based Websites

Social news and tagging websites focus on encouraging members to be active and contribute to their community on a regular basis.
The websites listed below allow you to position your content in front of visitors that are interested in the subject you are posting about. This will give you a great opportunity to build back-links. However you must ensure your content provides clear value in regards the subject you are posting about and that you do not spam under any circumstance.


StumbleUpon
Digg
Reddit
Delicous

2.Blog Creation

Building blogs from scratch (with the objective of adding backlinks) is by no means a simple task, however if you put the time and effort in to come up with high quality content and regularly post new blog articles it will definitely pay off in the long run.

If your website hasn’t yet got a blog, I recommend you get in touch with your WebDevelopment agency to discuss building one, because when done right, it will help with your SEO Ranking in a big way.

Posting blogs that are informative, about the services your provide that and target sectors you are keen to do business with can boost your reputation tremendously.


Finding bloggers within a similar business sector to yourself, building up a relationship and then asking them to link back to your website in return for linking back to their site is a brilliant way to build up backlinks and help with SEO for keywords you are targeting.

“85% of content published (excluding videos and quizzes) is less than 1,000 words long. However, long form content of over 1,000 words consistently receives more shares and links than shorter form content. Either people ignore the data or it is simply too hard for them to write quality long form content.”

3. Sharing on Social Media

Social Media is great for sharing your content, however, this is not a direct link building strategy as any content shared will be nofollowed. Nofollow instructs search engines that hyperlinks should not influence the ranking of the link’s target within the search engine’s index.


Sharing high quality content on a regular basis to the major social platforms, will grant you and your business more exposure, allowing you to build better relationships with your contacts (especially on Linkedin) and in turn allow you to earn more natural backlinks.

4. Posting To Question and Answer Websites

An excellent way to build authority and gain backlinks is by posting on Question and Answer websites. Yahoo Answers and Quora are all terrific to do this on.


The best practise is to find questions related to services that you deal with and then provide an informative answer with a link to a relevant blog post on the subject from your own website.

5. Build Relationships Offline

Building blogs, sharing on social and contributing to various websites content are all great ways to build quality backlinks to boost your SEO Rankings. However, at some stage the conversation needs to be taken offline.

Engage with your prospective clients on the phone or via video conferencing tools e.g. Skype or Google Hangouts.

Attend Networking events where you can meet with contacts you have made via socialplatforms
Arrange meetings over coffee or presentations with your contacts to discuss new business opportunities

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