If you haven’t integrated social media into your overall affiliate marketing strategy you’re not only losing customers, you’re also missing out on one the most effective SEO tools ever developed.
Why is social media so important to your SEO efforts? A recent blog posting on Directory Maximizer summed it up nicely by pointing that that social media shares are a more reliable metric for measuring usefulness than backlinks ever were. They’re more reliable because they’re completely organic.
Google’s recent moves against link networks were just the opening salvos in a much bigger battle. The search engine giant has made it very clear that social media is going to be a bigger factor in page rankings and that’s likely to be the norm going forward.
Affiliates who understand the power of social media on SEO will benefit from increased traffic; higher page rankings; and increased customer interaction. It’s a win, win, win.
What follows are some of our top tips for, and benefits of, harnessing social media for SEO purposes.
Social Media Builds Authority
Google algorithms are know to favor well established authority sites with lots of inbound and outbound links but becoming an authority site is easier said than done. Becoming an active presence on social media like Twitter and Facebook helps build up that inventory of quality, organic links over time.
Social Media Puts You in Front of Rock Stars
If you’re trying to get your content in front of industry heavy hitters, you could hardly ask for a better venue than social media. Posting on Facebook pages; direct Tweets; and other social mediums puts you right there in a way that’s harder to ignore than email. And, depending on the format, you can also put your content in front of the influencer’s audience, too.
Social Lets the Readers Do the Work
One of the biggest SEO benefits of social media is that it lets someone else do the heavy lifting. If you’re really engaged with your audience, and creating high quality content, they’ll happily share and re-share it all over the Internet. That’s exactly the kind of organic, relevant, sharing that Google prizes.
That’s why it’s so important for webmasters to make sharing, re-tweeting, and signing up for email news letters as easy as possible. A prominently placed share button can have a seriously positive effect on SEO efforts. WordPress plug ins like OptinSkin make creating share buttons, e-mail sign ups and other opt-in options as for webmasters and site visitors alike.
Learn how OptinSkin can help capture users.
Finally
Social media is the future of the Web and if you doubt that, take a look at Facebook’s 4 billions daily page views. Harnessing that power for your own SEO efforts is a relatively inexpensive SEO technique that search engines are favoring more and more. Don’t get left behind when the social media train leaves.
How are you integrating social media into your marketing efforts? Let us know on our SEO Forum.