search engine optimization

A Guide to Using SEO for Social Media

David Sharpe bio

Are you looking to get more followers on your social media profiles?

For the longest time, people debate whether social media helps with SEO or not. While the truth in that matter is still up for debate, there’s strong evidence suggesting SEO doesn’t increase through posts from social media or the like.

However, that doesn’t mean SEO doesn’t help you gain followers in social media.

SEO does wonders in making your page visible enough to help you gain a lot of followers online. It can also help you top social media search engines with the help of social SEO. This is different from normal SEO, so knowing all you can about it can give you an advantage over your competition on social media. Here at Legendary Marketer we often use Social Media SEO with our Facebook content.

Read what we have below to understand the relationship between social media and SEO. Use this to know what SEO can do for your social media profiles.

Social SEO is Similar to Traditional SEO in Certain Ways

Before learning about how SEO can help with your social media profile, understanding how social search optimization works should be among your first priorities. The reason for this is it allows you to do better in optimizing your social media content to rank higher.

A good way to understand social search optimization is to think of social media platforms like search engines in and of themselves. They have a ranking system as well as different factors affecting the SEO of a social media post. The way social search optimization is different though is it puts a higher priority on actions on a social media post.

Actions are the activity a post gets like shares, reactions, and comments. The more actions your post gets in a short span of time, the higher your SEO will be on social media. While creating content, you should ensure it gets a lot of views on YouTube, likes on Facebook, retweets on Twitter, and reactions on Instagram.

To help you get all those, here’s a list of the things you can do to improve your social media SEO.

1. Know How to Attract Your Intended Social Media Audience

As you create a social media profile, it’s imperative you first do some research on a few things. The most important bit to research though is your audience. Understanding your audience is the key to having a successful social media profile.

This is important because small factors like your demographic’s age and gender can play a big role in social media. If your intended audience are millennials, for example, they may respond better to your content if it has some humor mixed in and a touch of cynicism as well.

This is only one example of how you can mold your content to fit your audience. Also, while researching, you should pay attention to trends your audience leans towards. You can leverage these to catch their eye later on.

2. Make Correct Use of Keywords

Keywords are the essence of anything SEO related. This also holds true when it comes to the SEO of social media platforms.

There are 2 different kinds of keywords which you can choose to use in your content. Using any of the 2 will help people find your page faster and even help you appear on the front page of Google and the like.

Long Tail Keywords

This type of keywords is for a more specific audience. Often composed of four words or more, these keywords don’t bring much traffic to your content or page. This is due to the fact the words need to be specific to make them work like regular keywords.

Because they’re less likely to succeed, they’re not as contested as shorter keywords. This makes it easier for you to get a hold of a good keyword without worrying about contesting. Don't worry about the conditions you need to meet to make them work, these keywords can still be effective.

The best way to make long tail keywords work is to target a niche audience. While they’re fewer than a general audience, niches ensure you get priority on traffic should they search your long tail keyword. If you do this well, you should notice a great surge of traffic going to your content and social media page.

Short Tail Keywords

Opposite to long tail keywords, these keywords often have 2-3 words between them. These are also direct opposites to long tail keywords as they’re more useful for a general audience. Because they’re shorter, it’s easier for them to pick up a high search frequency from people on the internet.

This quality also makes them more contested than compared to a long tail keyword. Getting a hold of a short tail keyword can ensure a great rise in traffic from all audiences to your page though.

It also ensures a higher search frequency on traditional search engines. This is because they promote traditional SEO due to being a common word or phrase. Again, this will help other people coming from websites outside social media to find you.

Once you have your keyword ready for use, what you should do now is blend it in your content in a natural way. Grammar should take priority too as engines now check the usage of the keyword before ranking it.

Also, take care not to stuff your content with keywords. This is among the most common SEO mistakes people commit when creating content. Search engines will think bots made the content and mark it as spam, ensuring people don’t find your content.

3. Create Social Media Content on a Regular Basis

Creating and putting out content on a regular basis makes sure you make your mark on social media. It also helps social search engines to recognize you as an active page. Being active is something search engine bots love as they’re always on the lookout for dead pages.

The more activity your page has, the higher search engine bots will rank you. The ranking score you get from this is small, but doing so helps you build a social reputation.

As you begin as a page on social media, you can’t expect people to trust you at once. You need to earn their trust and posting content is a way to do that. Doing so also makes you look like a professional in your topic’s field.

Even when you’ve gathered a large audience, you shouldn’t stop posting content on the regular. If you must, reposting old content is a viable option. Doing this makes ensures your audience and search engine bots that you’re still an active page.

4. Ensure Your Social Media Content is Up to SEO Standards

While you’re grinding out the content, there are a few things to consider for matters of SEO. For example, you should consider your content’s grammar and composition. The quality of your content, if written, is often checked by the bots mentioned above.

Spelling or grammatical errors can drop your score by a significant amount. For video posts, what you should consider is the title, thumbnail, and length of it.

The title should contain your main keyword for marketing. Doing this makes it easier for your target audience to find on SEO and social media engines. The thumbnail should be appealing enough to catch the eye of anyone scrolling past most posts.

Your video’s length is also important as many people tend to skip longer videos. Keep it short and don’t drag your content out. Retention is important in video posts, so go straight to the point of why you’re making the video.

When it comes to images, there’s not much to discuss other than making it SEO compatible. To do this, you should compress it to SEO specifications. You can even have it licensed as an SEO image for others to use as well.

5. Learn the Basics of Link Building

Link building is one of the best ways you can promote your social media content with SEO. Mastering this means you can set up SEO for your page and content that can outlast any of the other current search engine optimization techniques.

The basics you should know about for link building are relevance and authority. Relevance pertains to how much your link relates to both your content and your audience. Having an irrelevant link may lessen your authority on your topic to your audience.

You should always make sure your links have a good connection to your topic and audience. To do this, you need to look beyond the title of a post and read the meat that’s its content. Titles are often misleading in that they sometimes don’t relate to the content.

In regards to the authority of links, there’s a certain way that works. As you know, we all start at the bottom at the beginning. You shouldn’t expect your links to hold much authority at all at first.

That can change over time though by using the other links with high authority on your content. Doing so increases your authority as well as increasing theirs. This makes this method a great way to build partnerships with other pages, too.

Know What SEO Can Do for Your Social Media Today

Social media is a big part of today’s world. Take full advantage of social media by increasing your social SEO score today! With it, you can create a successful social media page and skyrocket your social media career.

Need more info on how to create a successful business on social media? Visit our free online webclass to learn more marketing tips on how to bring in more traffic and views on your content.

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How Long Will It Actually Take to Rank in Google?

David Sharpe bio

In 1999, Google handled over one billion searches per year. In 2016, while not giving out specific stats, they claimed they're now handling over two trillion searches per year.

Globally speaking, there are over 1.6 billion websites (and counting). That can make getting ranked on Google seem a bit more daunting.

If you're looking how to rank on Google, you want to know how long it takes and what steps are involved. And Legendary Marketer can help.

Keep reading to learn how all about how to rank in Google.

How to Rank on Google Depends on a Variety of Factors

How long does it take to rank in Google?

If you're expecting to build a new website and immediately rank high on a Google search, you will be disappointed. How long it takes often depends on how competitive your industry is and how popular the keywords you use are.

And there are other factors that Google uses such as the strength of your website and even the skills and the budget amount that went into building your website.

Ranking in Google should be viewed as a process. It's also important to understand which websites are most likely to appear at the top of Google's ranking.

The Google Ranking Process

When someone types keywords into Google, the pages they receive are selected from the index based on how well they match up. And there's no exact formula that guarantees your website ends up at the top of searches.

One frustrating part is that the formula Google uses to rank websites is always changing. And they don't always openly share what changes they've made with the public.

That makes for a bit of a guessing game. However, these specific factors definitely play a role in getting your site ranked higher:

Content Quality

Google bots identify certain characteristics such as original content, the length, (and quality) of posts, and how often new content is published. One way to boost your site in the rankings is to keep adding new, original, high-quality content to your site.

The content should be relevant to your website. Google wants to ensure its customers that the sites that rank highest are providing the most trustworthy and reliable content possible.

Clean Domain

While it may seem tempting to try to cheat the system by purchasing inbound links or keyword stuffing, it's only a matter of time before Google catches on and penalizes your site. And it's a lengthy process to gain back their trust.

Look for high-quality links to add to your site. Avoid spammy links or any link that just isn't appropriate for the content you're adding.

Do things the right way and you'll notice positive results you and your customers can rely on. And keep things clean. Google is not a huge fan of inappropriate language or images.

Domain Age

Google strives to provides its customers with quality. Therefore, web domains that are less than six months old are considered less reliable or trustworthy than older, already verified sites.

Over time, as your site proves to be a safe site for people to visit, your site begins rising in the rankings. Just like you as a customer feel more comfortable using a company that's been around for a while rather than one that's just popped up, the same is true in on the internet.

Error-Free Website

Many people don't realize how minor mistakes can work against them, especially when they're trying to rank on Google. Mistakes such as slow loading sites, duplicate content, and broken links can force Google to penalize your site by ranking you lower.

If the errors are really bad, such as plagiarism, you may find your website is completely missing from the ranks. And it takes a while for you to get back into Google's good graces.

Make sure you get your website audited at least once a year to check for errors. Then immediately fix them.

Keyword Competition

Keywords and/or phrases that are used more often are considered more competitive. More established sites have already been using the most popular words and therefore those phrases have more merit on their sites.

Newer sites shouldn't bother to compete for keywords with more established sites. Instead, it's smarter to build rankings and trust by using keywords with lower levels of competition.

Once you've built up trust, you can start using the more popular keywords.

Length of Posts

In terms of the search index, the longer the posts, the more credible Google views your website. SEO content posts should never have fewer than 300 words in order to take advantage of positive ranking.

But, Google prefers longer posts. Posts ranging between 1,000 and 3,000 words tend to perform even better.

That's because Google thinks that a longer post means that your website is more of an authority on the subject matter you're writing about. The more authoritative a website looks to Google, the higher the ranking.

Original Content

Obviously, placing plagiarized content on your site for the sake of having content will work against you. Google will definitely penalize you for doing it.

But it's also not okay to write duplicate content. And Googe bots can literally index your site in seconds while cross-referencing all of its content with every other site in the search index at the same time.

You can't outsmart Google's bots so don't bother trying. Hire a professional writing service if you're not good at developing content on your own. And use internal links when you want to back up information without resorting to using duplicate content.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) works to help make your website more visible to Google bots and other indexing programs. The keywords, titles, headers, and ALT image texts you use all are a part of effective SEO.

SEO works to help organically boost your site to the top of the rankings. However, there is an art form for doing it correctly.

You may want to consider hiring professionals who specialize in SEO to help you out. Ranking higher on Google within less than a year is possible but only if you hire an SEO professional who has the time, knowledge, and budget to do it the right way.

How Long it Takes for SEO Efforts to Work

How long does it take for SEO to work? Most experts will tell you it takes between four and six months to start seeing actual results.

However, that's just the beginning and SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. Done correctly, you should see even better results after 12 months than you do in only six months.

Timeliness of Content

Google loves relevant content. Posts and content on current and breaking news rank higher in searches than those written about non-time-sensitive topics.

One way to get around that issue is to write articles on topics that are likely to stay relevant for a long time. However, it's also smart to write about topics that are also current event related on a regular basis as well.

Aim to add at least two or three new posts to your site each week. In most cases, the new content will be indexed, crawled and added to Google's search index almost immediately.

Quality External Reference Links

Always add high-quality external references links to your site. Make sure they're from legitimate sources.

Not only will your customers trust you more, but Google loves quality ranking and it will improve your rankings on their search index. To get quality backlinks, always post useful, relevant, and quality content.

The higher the quality of information you share on your site, the more likely people will use and share it with others. An SEO expert can help you create high-quality content that people can't resist sharing with everyone.

Tackling Negative Google Results

The one thing no website owner wants to content with is negative Google results. Maybe someone left a negative comment on your Google Business Listing.

Perhaps someone wrote a blog post that reflects poorly on your company. That could mean that all your hard work to boost your website in the rankings is all for nothing.

Steps to Handle Negative Google Results

Fortunately, there are steps to take to push down the negative results so that the positive results rank higher such as:

  • Create a Wikipedia page
  • Own New Domains
  • Create new pages with target keywords
  • Create an app
  • Set up social profiles
  • Optimize website site links

Also, activate a Google alert so that you'll receive a notification whenever your website's mentioned anywhere else. That way, you can use good mentions to help build up credibility.

And you can immediately take steps to handle or eliminate any negative online comments.

Watch Your Expectations

If you hire a marketing company to help you improve your site's online rankings and they tell you to expect immediate results, find another company. Even if you're doing it yourself, you should have reasonable expectations.

While you should expect to see results within six months, this isn't a sprint.

And these efforts aren't something you can do once and then expect to keep reaping the rewards. Ranking higher is an ongoing process that never ends.

Learn How to Rank In Google Yourself

Now that you know how to rank on Google, it's time to get started. Remember it's an ongoing process that you'll need to stay on top of.

It's also an ongoing educational process. The more you understand what you're doing, the more successful you'll be.

If you enjoyed this article on how to rank in Google, and want to learn how to match this powerful marketing skill with more money, you might want to learn how to earn high-ticket commissions marketing valuable products people already want to buy.

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