How important are social media platforms to your overall SEO strategy? If you haven’t been speaking the words, “SEO” and “social media in the same breath, you’re leaving plenty of SEO juice on the table. That’s the advice of Mark Traphagen, Content Strategy Director at Perficient Digital.
In a recent posting on SEO Journal titled, How to Use Social Media to Help Your SEO Efforts, Traphagen explodes some old myths about SEO and social, and explores new strategies for maximizing your social media presence for SEO gains.
For starters, Traphagen explains that social media does not directly drive SEO factors like authority, especially when it comes to comments. Even Google, it turns out, isn’t smart enough to parse out the piles of social comments for authority and authenticity and they don’t even bother crawling them.
But that doesn’t mean your social media presence doesn’t matter. That’s because the links that appear on social media posting do matter for SEO purposes.
If nothing else, Traphagen points out, posting your content on social media exposes it to a whole new audience who may be otherwise missing it. That creates some pretty incredible link opportunities that might not be happening without social media.
Traphagen also suggests that social media is a great place for posting up your best evergreen content. Social media can definitely extend the lives of these golden pieces of content while driving traffic and creating a positive buzz.
In short, there’s really no reason for businesses of any size to ignore social media as part of their overall SEO strategy.