Building links to your website via social media can enhance your rankings on Google, Bing, Yahoo and other popular search engines. It also has the additional benefit of bringing your site more social approval signals – such as Facebook Likes, having your link tweeted on Twitter, shared on Google+, and others –that can further push your site up the search engine rankings.
Referral Marketing
One of the best uses of social media for improving your search engine rankings is referral marketing. This is where you reward your customers for promoting your business or products to others, such as their family, friends, and social media contacts.
This type of word of mouth online marketing is one of the fastest and easiest ways for your website to go viral. All you have to do is to offer a progressively bigger set of rewards to encourage people to recruit more and more people as your customers.
You can offer rewards such as discounts, free products, access to exclusive offers or VIP status, and any other offer that people will genuinely want.
Your loyal customers already have proven that they like your business. So why not make them your best brand ambassadors by giving them incentives for promoting your business to their family and friends?
Ask Your Customers to Review Your Business or Products
Getting four-star reviews on Yahoo Local and its Google counterpart can help boost the ranking of your website on the corresponding search engines.
All you need to do is ask your loyal customers to write a review of your company, products or services on these online sites and you can quickly see your rankings improve. Other places where you can get your customers to write positive reviews include Yelp.
Write Your Own Wikipedia Page
Wikipedia is an open source site. That means anybody can contribute to it.
If your business or website doesn’t already have its own Wikipedia entry, write your own and post it on the popular authoritative site. You don’t want to make it an advertisement of your business because Wikipedia’s guidelines don’t allow purely promotional materials.
Instead of including a link directly to your company’s home page, link to other authoritative sites such as scholarly papers, scientific journals, or niche-specific websites in order to build the credibility and reputation of your business. Then you can include links from those links to your web pages in order to drive your search engine rankings.
Write Amazon Reviews
Review top products related to your niche on Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, then include links back to our website in the body of your reviews.
Or you can create your own product list and post it on Amazon. All you have to do is to register on Amazon for free, the use their free web-based tools, desktop software application, and text files to create a detailed inventory of your products.
The more you can use social media to promote the reputation of your business, the better your chances of pushing your website’s rankings higher up the search engine lists.
Finding Niche Bloggers
One of the most popular way to build quality links is Guest blogging and social media is a great way to connect with like-minded people and get your content published on their website/blog.
The process of guest blogging is fairly easy to execute – You find relevant sites, reach out to the owners or editors using channels like Twitter, Google+ etc., pitch your ideas, get approval and then send your content for publishing.
Guest blogging has a number of benefits which include –
- It helps you build new relationships
- You get to know and meet new people
- It helps with SEO
- It brings in targeted traffic and builds a new reader base for your site
A social media monitoring tool or platforms such as Mention, Brand24, and Awario all help in your guest blogging approach. Once you have found the right contact, social media is the best way to reach out to them with a pitch that’s neither salesy nor boring.
So, here then are 5 tactics for some quality yet SEO-friendly link building using social media. Whether you use it smartly for your website or not, depends totally on you. However, with such a wider reach, social media seems to be a logical medium for SEO outreach. In addition to the above, you can also make use of some helpful tools that can get you insightful data in minutes.
Author Bio –
Sameer Panjwani is the Founder & CEO of Mondovo.com, an online marketing toolset that helps you track your rankings, monitor your site stats, and research your competitors. A man of many talents, Sameer is currently on a mission to help 1 million businesses grow organically through his products and services.
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