Veteran business owners who are not optimizing their social media content are missing out on attracting the attention of the search engines and ultimately more visitor traffic to their business websites.
Search and more specifically the search engines have traditionally been a major source for a website’s internet customers, but since you most likely found this article 
through a link on social media you can see its increasing importance as an internet marketing platform. The important thing to remember is that the two concepts are not competitive, but you should use social media and the power of the search engines together to drive more traffic to your business website.
Managing Social Media and the Search Engines
To begin with you need to understand the fundamentals of both platforms. Managing social media includes posting and optimizing the content you curate on your social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Playing nice with the search engines involves a SEO strategy that will make your website or content more searchable so when a user searches for a product or service related to yours it is more likely your website will appear in search results for more details on optimizing your website check out our article “Internet Marketing Tip of the Day, Make Sure Your Website is Optimized”.
Even though SEO and social media management are different internet marketing strategies, they can still work together to boost your website search traffic. While people tend to use social media to learn about new products, services or happenings that is trending with their circle of friends and family, search engine optimization allows you to target the keywords or questions that people are searching for that are relevant to your business website. Keeping the search engines in mind while posting to your social media will help you gain traffic from a variety of different sources.
What Your Social Media Provides vs Search
Think of your social media as your business store front, you want to give your visitors the best look into what’s waiting for them inside your business so the content you post needs to present your products or services in the best light. Many times, a person on social media is seeing your product or service for the first time so you need to go for the Wow! Factor. Search traffic on the other hand, are people looking to have a question answered therefore your website needs to be prepared to answer that question or need that your visitor might have quickly and clearly or risk losing that potential customer to a competitor.
Tie Social Media and search Together
As we mentioned before, your search engines and social media platforms should work together. The same keyword strategy you used for your website’s SEO should also be used when you are posting to social media to connect the two together. By mixing your keywords into social media content, you can increase the reach of your business message.
Make Sure to Include Links in Your Social Media
As we have mentioned in the past, it is important to include links to your website in your social media profiles as well as content. The search engines award SEO authority to websites based on the number of other websites that are linking to them. Links in social media profiles are “Follow links” which means your website is given credit for them. Links in content tend to be “Un-follow Links” so your website will not get as much credit, but this is starting to change so it’s not a bad thing to include links to your business website in your content.
Make Sure to Optimize Social Profiles
Think of your social media profile page as extensions of your business website. Make sure your social media profiles have the same SEO strategy as your business website, in fact I often use a client’s website tagline or descriptions in their social media for consistency.
Build Your Social Media Network for Backlinks
Search engine optimization is about inbound links to your website. Many business owners are looking for ways to build inbound links or backlinks to increase traffic to their websites. a way to skip the hired internet marketers that will often do a cheap backlink building job for you is to share your content in social media, this will help you to increase the number of fans or followers of your account. By doing this through quality content creation and engagement, you will not only build social media reach but also inbound links.
Establish New Social Media Relationships
As we have discussed in the past, it is important to build your social network with like-minded individuals. Just like the old-fashioned sales calls, social media relationships are huge for driving inbound links and social media attention. Building relationships using social media can open opportunities for guest blog posts and other link-building opportunities.
How Social Media Impacts Your SEO
Combining both strategies will increase your chances for audiences to see your product or service, as well as indirectly increasing your website traffic which means potential new customers coming to your website. Having engaging social media content can help this process and when you get more traffic to your website the search engine “bots” that crawl the internet will notice this increase in activity and give your website more credibility which in turn can lead to higher search engine rankings.
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