Social Media Impact on SEO: 3 Common Social Media Mistakes and How to Avoid Them!

It is no longer a secret that social media impacts search rankings. SEO professionals are actively incorporating social media strategies into the overall SEO plan to enhance the search rankings of client websites.

The most crucial social signals according to Matt Cutts of Google are number of social recommendations and social shares by high authority social media users.

Practically all businesses have now jumped on to the social media bandwagon to utilize social media for SEO. And I am sure you are doing it too. The question is what social media strategies are you using for enhancing your search rankings? This is important because there are some common mistakes and you could be inadvertently making those mistakes.

Common Social Media Mistakes for Enhancing Search Rankings and How to Avoid them

Using Social Media Solely for Self Promotion

The SEO benefit in using social media comes from sharing your content link on your social media page and getting maximum click-thrus and traffic surge to your website. But using social media to always share only your content and always only promoting your website will not help in the long run. Don’t forget that social media is a social platform and not a promotional platform. While traffic surge is a direct SEO benefit, the social signal for SEO is when your content gets maximum social shares and recommendations. And this will happen only if you share others’ content. You can be sure that no one will share your content if you don’t share theirs.

Creating Fake Social Media Accounts to Boost Social Signals

Creating fake social media accounts to garner more ‘likes’, ‘tweets’ and ‘+1s’ to increase search rankings by strengthening social signals may seem a good idea. But is it worth it? Just think about it. How long will you keep doing it? Isn’t it a waste of productive time?

You will be better off using the time to create high value relevant content that will naturally receive more social shares and recommendations. And when you create content that touches a chord, there are high chances it may go viral, pushing your search rankings through the roof. And excellent content that adds maximum value may be shared by high authority power social media user, a positive social signal for SEO.

All these scenarios will not happen if you are busy commenting on your own posts via different fake accounts, that’s for sure.

Posting On Social Media Because You HAVE to

OK, you have probably read everywhere that you need to be active on social media to maximize its SEO benefits. But posting everyday and more than once a day just to be ‘active’ is not the right approach.

Post on social media when you have something relevant to say. And your posts should be a mixture of links to your own content, content by others that you want to share, comments on others’ posts etc. You should in general use social media to engage with your customers and community.

Directly engaging with customers on social media and resolving their queries and issues has benefits beyond SEO and helps to enhance goodwill and business, which is the ultimate aim of social media and SEO in the first place.

And by engaging with peers and influencers in your niche, you open the doors for guest blogging opportunities on their websites with high value SEO back links.

Were you making these mistakes in your social-SEO strategy? Well now you know how to avoid them.

Author Bio: Post Penguin link building consultant Yasir Khan wrote this intuitive article. Yasir is the founder of Canada’s leading SEO firm Quantum SEO Labs.