Social media isn’t just a channel to connect with your customers. When incorporated into a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, it can effectively boost your website’s search rankings. But how does social media help with SEO exactly? It’s easy to group them with other backlinks, but that’s not the case.
Technically speaking, if one website links to another, it’s a backlink. By this definition, you can say that social media links that point to your website are as backlinks.
That said, a backlink usually refers to links that work for SEO and affect your search engine rankings. In this case, social media links can’t be considered backlinks because they tend to be No-Follow links. No-Follow links don’t pass any authority to your website, nor do they have a direct impact on your search engine performance. For that, you’re better off generating content using the best web hosting services available.
Can I Use Social Media for SEO?
Before you give up your social media strategy in exchange for practices like backlink buying—a practice for which you’ll need to understand what kind of backlink buying is allowed—know that you can definitely still use social media for SEO.
Social media provides great opportunities for link-building as social signals continue to have a solid connection with search engine rankings. When a credible social media page with high engagement is connected with your website, search engines note your site’s authority which helps you rank higher in search results for relevant keywords.
How to Use Social Media for Link-Building
The simplest way to use social media for link-building is by connecting your profiles with your website and linking to your content from social media posts, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are multiple ways to leverage your social presence to generate better SEO results. Here are some examples:
Optimize Your Profiles
Make sure that all of your social media profiles are linked to your website. That means adding your URL to any place it can be added, including your bio and your posts, which is especially important on social media sites that have strong sharing properties, such as Pinterest or Twitter.
Create Shareable Content
“Shareable content” refers to pieces of media that people are more likely to share. They can also be considered viral content. A great example you can try is infographics–this is one of the most shared forms of content because they’re visually digestible and able to convey a lot of information in a single piece of media.
Additionally, it’s important to diversify your content. Try different forms of media like videos, stories, podcasts, and articles—and remember to add your website link to all of them.
Build Relationships
Search engines are more likely to consider social media accounts with large followings and high engagement authorities, so it’s necessary to build relationships through your profiles. Engage your audience, build relationships with high-performing accounts, and keep people on your pages.
Get People Talking
To increase your engagement, conduct campaigns that will get people talking about your brand. Encourage reviews to build trust, promote events to get people interested in what you do, and hold contests to get more traction.
Get Better Backlinks With a PBN
Social media can help boost your search engine rankings, but it doesn’t do it in the same way as organic backlinks. If you’re looking for a strategy more closely aligned with the latter, then generating natural links through a PBN hosting service like Easy Blog Networks might be the answer. The definition of a private blog network (PBN) is a network of sites that produce backlinks for a central website to help it rank higher on search engines, helping you to maximize your backlink strategy safely and conveniently.