Denver’s largest social media for business group, Social Media for Business – Join the Conversation, hosted its 30th meetup in March, 2012. The topic was Social Media’s Role in Your Company’s SEO.
A common question for business owners employing social media marketing is, “How does social media help my Website get to page 1 on Google?” Webolutions, a top Denver search engine marketing company, CEO John Vachalek opened the discussion with some SEO fundamentals.
The Goal of Every Search Engine
To provide the most relevant search results possible!
Key Factors Determining Your Search Engine Placement
- Site Saturation – The number of indexed pages at your Website
- Inbound Links & Relevancy – The number of “good” links to your Website
- Website URLs – Your main URL and the URLs of all the pages within your Website
- Addition of New Content – Measures how often are you adding fresh site content
- Website Page Titles – The Title Tags on each page of your Website
- Website Page Header Tags – H1, H2, H3 tags on each page of your Website
- Website Page Body Content – use of relevant keywords, themes and hyperlinks
- Website Interlinking Strategies – Relevancy and structure of the links within your site
- Website Crawlability – XML Site Maps, HTML Site Maps, Robots.txt
- Physical Address & Local References – Consistency, reviews, etc.
Social media’s impact on SEO is multi-fold:
Site Saturation
To provide regular, consistent, on-brand content for social media marketing, businesses must create content. Webolutions recommends first publishing content to your Website–in a blog, for example. This can dramatically increase overall Website Site Saturation: Three blog posts a week = 156 pages of content a year.
Inbound Links & Relevancy
Using social media to tell people about the valuable content published at company Websites increase the number of inbound links. Businesses who do this well can become a recognized thought leader for relevant audiences and score better on search engines.
Content virality can be increased with the use of imagery and tools such as ShareThis.
Reach
How large a presence and much influence do you have? Algorithms are increasingly considering the size of a company’s overall Web presence and influence. The more Facebook shares, Retweets and Google +1’s, the better.
Website URL’s
URL’s (Web addresses) with keywords properly formatted in them score higher for those keywords. Similarly, blog posts, status updates, Tweets, etc. employing this practice enjoy increased targeted visibility.
Website Page Titles, Header Tags, Body Content, Interlinking & Crawlability
Use relevant keywords within social media content!
Physical Address & Local References
Google has merged local search with organic for many categories. While one factor is “proximity to centroid,” or the closeness to the identified city center, most important is to be consistent with the information published about your company. Quantity of reviews on local listings is also a factor—the more, the better! Ask your social network to comment on your business.
Highlights of the session included a presentation from Tia Kennedy, Gen Y Engagement Specialist at Public Service Credit Union. Tia attended Social Media Week in New York City in February and provided some takeaways, including overarching strategy points and a few tactical tips.
Speaking of tips, Pinterest was added to our Tips Group—and was much larger than Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter! The group will keep this setup until further notice, so please come with your questions and observations about using Pinterest for your business!
As always, we enjoyed breakfast treats from My Favorite Muffin and Pete’s Coffee SouthGlenn; and perfect surroundings courtesy of the South Metro Denver Chamber of Commerce.
Thanks to Dale Honning of Dale Honning Videography, a complete chronology of the event is available on the Webolutions Facebook Page. Upcoming meetings include:
- April 20 – Utilizing Video in Your Social Marketing
- May 18 – Social Marketing to a Targeted Local Audience
- June 15 – Creating a Successful Content Generation Plan
Join us! The entire business community is welcome and there is no charge to attend. Between meetings, the conversation continues on Meetup, Facebook and Twitter. Want updates and recaps delivered to your inbox? Join the group’s email list!
We hope you’ll join us April 20 at the Chamber!
