18 Social Media SEO Resources to Improve Your Search Ranking

Do you know how social media impacts SEO?

Are your own search and social efforts aligned?

For many marketers, it’s not always clear how social media impacts search engine optimization.
In this article you’ll find numerous resources to help you understand how social media SEO works.

Why Social Media SEO?

It’s not enough to have a popular website with good content anymore. If you want better search engine results for your business, it’s time to look at how social media influences those results.

It used to be that SEO revolved around two things: using the right keywords, and the number of authoritative sites that linked back to your content via inbound links.

Then social media came along and changed everything.

Search engines have begun to incorporate social signals (Facebook likes, retweets, +1s and so on) to inform their search results.

The following articles dig a little deeper and explain what you need to do to make sure you succeed at social media and SEO.

6 Reasons Social Media Is Critical to Your SEO: If you need more clarity on how SEO and social work together, Stephanie Frasco explains on Social Media Today that the old days of website marketing are over and Google has found a newer, smarter way to measure the popularity of your website—social media.

How to Succeed at SEO With Social Media Marketing: On ExactTarget Amanda Nelson likens SEO and social media to peanut butter and jelly, the idea being that the two need each other to succeed. Dig in and enjoy the nuggets of wisdom and some best practices shared in a conversation between Amanda and her guest, Ray Grieselhuber.

SEO and social media go together.

Now that you know why it’s important, let’s get down to business and talk about how you can align both your social and SEO efforts. Here are five best practices for social media SEO:

#1: Publish High-Quality Content

You’ll hear it over and over because it’s true: “Content is king, and everything else is gravy!” If you can get your content right, you’ll have set a strong foundation for SEO success. Here are some posts to get you thinking in the right direction.

Why Content Is Part of a Smart SEO Strategy: Google continues to push a quality-over-quantity approach to drive search traffic to a website. In this post on Search Engine Journal, Sujan Patel explains why quality content is important to SEO and how your strategy must go beyond keyword optimization and link-building.

Quality content is important to your SEO.

How to Write So Google Loves You (Easier Than You Think!): Do you often wonder whether you should be writing for people or for search engines? Well, this excellent post from Nicholas Whitmore instructs you to just “write how you speak“—and with good reason. Check it out!

#2: Make Social Sharing Easy

Getting people to share your content on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and other networks connects your brand to the wider social web, which allows your message to potentially reach thousands of prospects. The following posts explain how to get your content shared easily and quickly.

How to Customize Your Social Share Buttons for Increased Traffic: In this helpful how-to Social Media Examiner post, Angie Pascale walks you through the process of pre-populating social media share buttons for Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Facebook with links to your own website.

6 Ways to Create Content Your Readers Will Share: This short and sweet post by Martin Lieberman of Constant Contact reminds us that the holy grail of social media is not likes, but shares and retweets. Social sharing is the tech version of word-of-mouth marketing that drives new business for a brand.

Social sharing affects your SEO.

Social Sharing: How to Inspire Fans to Share Your Stories: In this Social Media Examiner podcast, Simon Mainwaring explains how to tap into the power of your fans to spread your stories. One important lesson he shares is that brands have to stop talking about themselves and start talking about their customers.

600+ Places to Share Your Content and GET MORE Traffic: This is priceless! After you’ve hit the Publish button on your blog, you’re not done. This ultimate “power list” compiled by Kim Roach shows you 600 different places where you can distribute your posts to reach an even wider audience.

Distribute your posts to drive more traffic.

The Essential Guide to Content Sharing: Asking people to share your content is a simple way to boost your page traffic. Ian Cleary of RazorSocial shares a collection of social media “super tools” that make it incredibly easy to promote your content and reach new audiences.

#3: Boost Your Images and Profiles

If you’ve been blogging for a while, you know that images can be a powerful SEO magnet. The problem is, they’re often overlooked in favor of written content. This is a big mistake. These articles explain how images impact SEO and the different areas of image optimization that you need to focus on.

3 Ways to Optimize Images for Search, Social Media & User Experience: Ashley Zeckman of TopRank Blog explains how images can have a big impact on visibility in search engines. Her actionable tips on how to make your images important searchable assets are a must-read!

5 Must-Have WordPress Plugins for Perfectly Optimized Images: Ann Smarty provides an impressive list of absolutely must-have WordPress plugins to optimize blog images and see your traffic spike. It’s got a lot of important details, but thankfully the screenshots make it easy to follow along.

WordPress has plugins that help you optimize your images.

SEO Boost Your Social Media Profiles: Alex Chris shares how to optimize social media profiles on Facebook, Google+, Twitter and Pinterest for more brand exposure. The benefit of doing this is that more people will be able to find your profile, connect with you and ultimately visit your website. Sweet!

#4: Don’t Forget Authorship Metadata (Google+)

One of the most important features of Google+ is authorship. Simply put, this feature allows the author’s picture to appear next to search results of content they have created. The following posts explain how Google authorship impacts content creators and SEO.

Google Authorship: The Future of Your SEO Is You!: Over at Search Engine Journal, Bernadette Coleman reminds us how important it is to embrace author rank. With Google authorship, you can improve your search ranking and brand yourself as a thought leader in your field. And all you have to do is add a face to your work!

Google Authorship will improve your search ranking.

How to Add Google Author Tags to Your Blog for Improved Search Results: In this Social Media Examiner article, Don Power asks, “Does Google know you’re the author of the content you publish?” A lot of bloggers don’t know how to answer that question, so if you’re one of them, you need to read all about it here!

Getting Authorship to Work: A Moz.com Case Study: What can you do if you have trouble getting Authorship to work smoothly on your blog? Ruth Burr from MOZ, shares how her company navigated several hiccups to successfully integrate Authorship into Moz.com, so you can troubleshoot your own installation.

Troubleshoot any problems you have with Google Authorship.

#5: Measure Social Media Performance

Whatever your goal, measure! Measuring and analyzing your efforts are key to having effective SEO tactics. When you track and analyze what’s working, you can focus on the things that matter. These very instructive posts will start you off on the right foot!

Measuring What Matters in Social Media: There are many reasons your brand uses social media in the first place—increasing brand awareness, generating leads, driving sales and many more. The only way to know whether you’re achieving those goals is to measure them. Unfortunately, as Tania Yuki of ComScore observes, many brands get fixated on measuring the wrong things.

Measure the metrics that relate to your goals.

How to Measure Your Social Media Traffic Using Google Analytics: Liz Lockard is spot-on with her comprehensive instructions for using Google analytics to track the impact of your social media traffic. Having this information helps you know where to focus your efforts in social media!

How to Measure and Report Social SEO Metrics: Measuring social media is tricky enough, but measuring the impact of your social media efforts on SEO can be even more mind-boggling.

Thankfully, Clayburn Griffin has you covered in this informative post on Raventools whose key message is, “Pay attention to the data. It will tell you what to do.”

What do you think? Do you have other tips and tactics to add to this list? Please share and link up additional resources in the comment box below.

Mobile Social Media Exploding According to New Research

Are you looking for the latest trends in social media marketing?

Has your business kept up with the growing mobile social media opportunities?

New research seems to show all roads leading to mobile. Whether we’re talking about Facebook, YouTube or the latest new toy, Snapchat—research shows that well-executed mobile strategies will offer the biggest payoff for marketers.

Here’s a summary of the latest research…
#1: Facebook Mobile is Largest Source of Social Traffic

According to Shareaholic’s Social Media Traffic Report (October 2013), publishers saw average referral traffic from Facebook mobile grow 253% between September 2012 and September 2013!

There are two reasons for this. First, as of September 2013, 874 million people used Facebook’s mobile app, up by 45% from the year before. Second, smartphone use has reached critical mass here in the U.S. (53% of Americans are smartphone owners).


Mobile is a powerful source of social traffic.

We’ve talked about this before, but it’s important enough that it bears repeating. Your number-one priority at this point is to figure out how your Facebook marketingfits into your mobile strategy. Start by taking the following simple steps:
Make sure your status updates are short and to the point. Long status updates will turn mobile users away (unless you’re Mari Smith!).
Shorten your links using bit.ly or any other URL-shortening tool.
You already know how important it is to use plenty of visual content on Facebook. However, it’s equally important that images are easy to understand. Some infographics that marketers post on Facebook are very difficult to see on a mobile screen.
#2: Geo-Targeting Puts Mobile on the Map

Perhaps the most exciting advance in mobile marketing is geo-targeting—being able to pinpoint the exact whereabouts of your customers so you can deliver relevant ads.

According to eMarketer, brands are extremely eager to make their ads more contextually relevant and so spending on geo-targeted ads is growing rapidly.



Marketers are eager to spend more money on geo-targeted ads.

Actionable Marketing Tips:

If you have a physical location, you should consider investing in geo-targeted adsas part of your mobile strategy.

Since most U.S. ad buyers are looking to make their dollars stretch, geo-targeting and couponing could be great opportunities to explore. With almost 100 million Americans redeeming digital coupons in 2012, there’s clearly a large and growing mobile user base that marketers can target better.

Consider a couponing strategy based on Foursquare or Facebook Places, andensure that customers redeem at a high rate by offering something relevant and worthwhile.
#3: Snapchat and Instagram Gain Social Currency

Although Facebook remains the number-one photo-sharing site on the Internet,Snapchat is driving impressive photo-sharing traffic with 350 million photos per day!

A Pew Research survey found that 9% of cell phone owners now use Snapchat and 18% of cell phone owners use Instagram.



Photo sharing has become an essential part of the online social experience. Image source: iStockphoto

These numbers might seem small, but Snapchat and Instagram are relatively new platforms that have not been fully explored. Still, they’re growing at a rapid pace, represent real-time engagement and with the right approach could offer marketers big opportunities to reach new customers.

Actionable Marketing Tips:

Photo and video sharing have become an integral part of the online social experience. Here are some tips you could copy from pioneering marketers:
Discounts—NYC-based yogurt shop 16 Handles ran a promotion using Snapchat. First, they asked customers to take a Snapchat image of themselves eating one of their yogurts on site and send it to the company’s Snapchat account. Then the company automatically sent a Snapchat image of a discount coupon back to the user’s account. Finally, the user would have to wait to open the snap containing the discount coupon until he or she was at the register and ready to redeem it, because once the image is opened it automatically deletes itself 10 seconds later.
Events—Encourage your event attendees to take Snapchat pictures or videos from the event location and share them with their friends. This creates excitement and buzz as users share their experiences of your event among themselves.
Share insider information—Send “leaked” images of your latest product or information to your most loyal customers to create excitement and interest around your brand (tip of the hat to Amy Birch at Social Media Today).
Check out these additional tips for using Instagram.
#4: Use of Video for Marketing Is a Must!

Video is everywhere! It’s even in your customers’ pockets (or purses) in the form of mobile apps for Vine, Instagram, YouTube and more recently Snapchat (see #4 above).

In fact, a recent poll conducted by eMarketer found that 93% of marketers had used video for online marketing, sales or communications at some point in 2013, up from 81% in 2012. Falling costs of video production plus the elimination of barriers to video content distribution have made this trend possible.



Use video in your marketing, sales or communications.

Here’s an interesting narrative about the state of video in 2013.



Actionable Marketing Tips:

When developing your video strategy, think about where your customers are in the sales process (their “customer journey”) and then create several videos that align with the different stages:
For brand awareness, you should have a video to introduce potential customers to your brand or service.
When they decide that they want to know more about your brand,consider offering them a “solutions overview” video to address some of their challenges.
Toward the end of the customer journey, you should have several product videos to demonstrate how your product works or what benefits it offers. Cisco makes over 1000 videos per year, just to make sure that their prospects understand the product throughout all phases of their customer journey.
#5: Social Media Skills Lacking

Social media is no longer optional for most organizations in the U.S. But there’s a problem—lack of training! A survey by Altimeter Group found that basic employee skills in social media use are seriously lacking.

Only 18% of those surveyed believed that employees have a good or very good understanding of social media or the organization’s social media policies. 61% of organizations have zero or ad hoc training programs for social media.

Untrained social media employees can cause significant problems for your business—for example, damage to your brand’s reputation, disclosure of confidential information and even regulatory or compliance violations.



Employees are not getting proper social media training.

Actionable Marketing Tips:

Here are some proven ways to train your employees in social media marketing:
Define clear objectives for using social media.
Establish safeguards to protect both employees and customers in relation to social media use; for example, a social style guide and a clear social media policy.
Provide professional training to empower employees to use social media tools; for example, Social Media Marketing World is coming up in March 2014 and is a great opportunity to train your employees and managers.

Here are some more ideas for training your staff.

Over to You

What do you think? Which of these social trends will you adopt? Please share your thoughts in the comment box below.