Whilst most site owners are used to the idea of optimizing their sites for the search engines and have tweaked their site content, keywords and backlinks accordingly, one other area that they might not have considered necessary for SEO is amongst their social media profiles. However to not pay any attention to social media as a source of search engine juice is a mistake; these days, optimizing your profiles on social media is becoming almost as crucial as your site itself. That’s because search engines are now indexing twitter streams in real time and using links from most social media sites as part of their rankings. Additionally Google has now launched its Google Social Search feature. This article will outline five tips to get you started on your social media SEO:
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Optimize Your Tweets
If you want to turn up on those search results then you need to throw in those important keywords, key phrases and hashtags from time to time. Obviously you don’t want to do this all of the time as that would inevitably make for some tedious reading, but if you throw in a keyword or phrase every week that should help. Some studies have suggested that using keywords all the time will move you up the search engines, but if you choose to do this you need to try and be very, very subtle in how you do it. In addition, save all your best and most important tweets in your favourite category and try and get a lot of retweets as this can vastly improve your social authority, which in turn will boost your rankings.
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Optimize Your Twitter Username
Instead of having a funky and personal twitter name, think of your twitter username as being for your business and subject to the same kind of rules as your domain name. For this reason it is essential to have your most important keywords in the username and to avoid underscores and hyphens. If you can do all that as well as coming up with something catchy (and try to keep it under 10 characters) then you’ll be doing well.
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Link to the Full URL
Shortened URL’s often get people suspicious and that is the last thing you want to do. Avoid placing abbreviated URL’s on your social media profiles as the worst thing you can do is make potential visitors or customers suspicious.
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Optimize Your Social Media Bios
Google and most other search engines are now taking content from Twitter’s bio section to form the meta description for Twitter profiles in their results. Consequently you should use the bio to strike a balance between interesting content that will make people want to find out more about you and your business, and keywords that will attract the rankings. If you have to prioritize one thing it should be the quality of the content. Make it interesting, intriguing, informative and then, once you have done all that, subtly add in those keywords. One final thing – don’t forget to optimize your Twitter photo with a keyword based name too.
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Optimize Those Twitter Lists
Search Engines adore Twitter Lists. They may be new on the scene but they’ve got wonderful ranking juice. Make sure you use them to get the best SEO for your business. Always make your lists public and put those keywords in the list names.
Follow these five steps and you will quickly get your social media optimization up and running.
