When you’re just getting started, SEO can be a slow and somewhat difficult process. Fortunately, there are many ways you can speed the process up. One of these ways is through the use of social media.

Types of Social Media

When people think of social media, many simply only think of FaceBook, Twitter, and Tumblr. People seldom realize that social media is more than just social networks. Once you realize how many options you have for helping your SEO with social media, you’ll have a simple time speeding up the process of SEO.

Social media comes in six main forms: social networks, such as LinkedIn and FaceBook, microblogging, media sharing, such as YouTube and Instagram, blog posts and forum comments, bookmarking sites, such as Delicious and StumbleUpon, and social news, such as Digg and Reddit.

Importance of Integration

Social media can directly affect SEO, and it can also indirectly affect SEO. However, many companies are not taking the time and resources to integrate their social media with their SEO as much as they possibly can.

Plenty of people believe that there are only two choices when it comes to social media and SEO. Either they do one or the other, yet they don’t understand that they can effectively do both to maximize potential.

How Social Media Benefits SEO

When it comes to SEO, your ranking in a search engine depends a lot on social signals. These social signals are basically links leading to your website from popular and authoritative websites.

Basically, if a post of yours has a lot of views, likes, or comments, that post is more likely to show up in the search engine than a post with little to zero views, likes, or comments. For example, if you search for a how-to guide in the Google search engine, chances are YouTube videos with many views and likes will show up.

Benefits of Social Media and SEO

The major benefit of SEO is that it’s a great way to increase your traffic. An increase in traffic means that more people will be exposed to your products or services, which in turn, means more sales and profits.

Also, SEO is a type of promotion that does not rest. Traffic from SEO doesn’t stop while you sleep, nor does it stop for a well-optimized website if you neglect the SEO for a while.

SEO can help improve your brand credibility, since for most people, the higher a website is ranked in the search engine, the more respected it is.

Social media will also improve and help you build a brand. If you stick to one social media website for a while, you will eventually gain a large following of people who trust you and care about what you have to offer. Social media websites are highly popular and is one of the best ways to spread your message to many people at once.  It is also worth bearing in mind that you can also use SEO to gain popularity for your social media pages.

While you definitely shouldn’t switch up your social media platforms often, don’t depend on one type of social media or one website for SEO, because if the type of social media or website suddenly becomes less effective when it comes to SEO, you’ll have to start from square one with another website or type of social media.

Many people make the mistake of seeing SEO and social media as two separate things that shouldn’t touch. Yet, as you can see, social media and SEO go hand in hand together, and have many benefits when companies integrate the two.

Images: Widjaya Ivan – CC BY 2.0