Let’s accept it – the Internet is moving from ‘search’ towards ‘social’. As the world embraces social media, ‘search’ is also trying to relate with it. This doesn’t mean that people will stop using search engines to solve their queries. While we get all set to build our social networks, the same force can strengthen our SEO simultaneously.

Dominate SERPs

Profiles on sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook show up in search results. To make the most of this, you need to do more than just creating the profile. Make the page more informative and keep the profile active through regular participation. Participate in LinkedIn Q&A. Build followers on Twitter and add meaty content to your Facebook profile regularly. This will help you secure all positions for your brand name on Page 1 of search engine results. Your competitors will never be able to leach branded traffic from the search engines.

Get Direct Links

The profile pages of some social media sites have a ‘do-follow’ link. Pointing this to your site gives it direct credit. Even if some social media profiles offer ‘no follow’ links, they earn some benefit for the page they link to.

Design Second Order Links

There’s always a possibility of gain in terms of SEO as many people pick links from social networks and post them elsewhere – it may be their own blog, site or profile. To optimize this process, it is important that whatever content is posted on your social media profile is worth sharing. This will drive an effect at the second order and benefit the site’s compatibility with search engines in the long run.

The more shareable the content is, the greater is an average user’s tendency to link out to it. This, in the long run, will have to be one of the factors to be considered for SERPs.

Repackage Social Content

Take interesting tweets or Facebook comments on an update. Then, republish it on your site with screenshots of the stream of comments/tweets. Do a little bit of analysis of the issue, keeping the opinions expressed by your network as the base of the content. Make this piece keyword rich and link it back to the relevant social media profile of your business.

Transcribe Videos

Pick up the most popular videos from your YouTube channel or any other profile. Start transcribing them. Don’t worry if they are long or difficult to understand. Break out the things that are important. Bold them. Highlight some quotes. Give the transcription an SEO friendly title and post it on your site or blog with the video embedded on that page. Make sure that the video is also optimized with the right tagging and description.

Aggregate Answers

Use your profile on Yahoo Answers to collect a group of questions pertaining to the domain of your business. Create an FAQ section on your website and promote it as the source of answers to all queries. Link back to this page in social platforms like forums and Q&A platforms.

Drive Traffic

Any update has the potential to promote a link. Doing that smartly can drive quality direct traffic proportionate to the number of followers you have. Search engines pay attention to how popular a link is and that becomes one of the factors for determining the position it receives in the search engine results. You can study analytics to identify the SEO variables you want to tie to your social media activities.

Be Current

Search engines work towards enhancing user experience by offering better results. That’s why they are moving towards real-time search. Here, tweets play an important role in determining the relative authority of news items. Also, this will promote sources of news that are not one of the top news aggregators, but trusted by the public.

Boost Off Page SEO

Social profiles can become a powerful weapon to boost your off page optimization campaigns. For example, placing the bookmarks effectively can help build substantial traction to pages like article submissions produced for optimizing the mother site.

The final tip, and probably the most important one is – Don’t Mix Up. Fundamentally, the user is seeking good experience, be it through search or social platforms. Thus, it is very important that in whichever way you leveragesocial media to support SEO, you still stay social in your behavior. While you may be thinking links, you shouldn’t be talking links.