The other day I wrote a post for small businesses that are beginning to bring their business online. In it I talked about social media and how to Harness the Power of Social Media in Your Small Business. I want to expand this topic a bit with some thoughts about how social media can help your search engine optimization.
There are many ways that social media can be used. Of course, there is the personal usage and there is also the business marketing aspect. Most small businesses that use social media utilize separate business pages, as it should be. Adding social media to your business is a great way to grow traffic and keep your customers involved in your business.
Social media has also become important over the past year in terms of SEO. Search engines are now incorporating social media mentions and interactions into their ranking making sites like Facebook, Google +, Twitter and others an important tool for you to use. Social media and SEO must now go hand in hand.
Google authorship is a great tool to use for boosting your SEO. It has powerful results and shows that you are the author of an article or post that is shared. When setting up a Google+ page, there are options there to add your authorship information. There are also many plugins in Wordpress blogs that can help you when publishing as well. If you use YOAST or All in One SEO plugins, you can just fill in the data for your Google+ and other social sites too.
Quality content is one of the driving factors for social media. With great content, your tweets, Facebook Posts, Pinterest images will more than likely be shared more often which will make the search engines take notice.
Images are also highly desirable when it comes to social media and internet searches. Social sites like Pinterest, Flickr, Photobucket, and Instagram are image driven so high quality images with SEO optimized information attached will help drive traffic, not only on the social site, but also in click-throughs to your blog.
All in all, social media sites can be a powerful tool in your small business. They help you reach others that you would otherwise not find. Potential customers, some increase in search rankings and generally more traffic for your business is out there. You just have to work it into your business plan and start implementing it for results.