With most fashion brands and PR agencies on Facebook and Twitter, it’s important to take a step back from all the liking and #followfriday-ing to consider how these platforms can be leveraged to boost your SEO. However, before leveraging these tools to promote your blog, it’s important to first look at where you are driving traffic. In the following three articles, we will examine the best ways to optimize content for search and sharing on social media.
Before sharing a few best practices, I’ll let my colleague Chris Lightner (@clightner), VP Analytics at Edelman Digital, share a handful of retweetable SEO tips for Twitter:
Although Twitter allows for 140 characters, consider how re-tweetable your content is when writing your tweet and leave a little room for your Twitter handle. If someone re-tweets your content, will they have to edit out content in order to make their tweet fit within the 140 characters since the tweet now contains mention of your handle? More re-tweets lead to higher search rankings, so be considerate and let people re-tweet your content with ease.
Consider what your Tweet leads in with (i.e. the first 20-30 characters) as this is what will show up in Google search results and could potentially make or break the decision for a visitor to click on the Tweet.
People talk about how they search, so make sure you understand how others are tweeting/talking about a particular topic when writing your tweet. Are you using the right hashtags and keywords? If you were searching for content on the topic you’re tweeting about, how would you search for it in Google or Bing? Use similar long string quotes in your tweet so people find your content with consistent language for how they search.
@Macys, @cutblog and @glamourdotcom are prime examples of using relevant tags to insert their presence into the current conversations. Doing a quick search on Twitter will reveal how often a hashtag is used and its trending popularity. Just remember to change the default from top results to all results.
By using #nyfw, @cutblog is not only inserting their presence into the conversation on Twitter search, these popular event tags are many times aggregated and curated by widgets and microsites like Twitter’s #nyfw microsite sponsored by American Express.
@glamourdotcom also uses hashtags with two purposes: 1) optimize content for search 2) organize content similar to the print magazine.
Start leaving space in your tweets to allow people to easily retweet and check out Twitter search, trending topics and competitor tweets to discover (and then use) keywords to help drive more views to your tweets.
About Sarah Essary
Sarah Essary blogs over at Consuming PR.
