Every business needs a decent search ranking in order to keep growing and to attract new customers. Whatever products you sell or service you provide, your social media presence can assist in moving you up the search results pages.

There are no special tricks to using social media to boost your search rank, there is no investment involved other than time and you don’t need special tools. All you have to do is become popular on social media and then recommend your own website.

It will help drive traffic to your site, which will attract the attention of search engines so that they rank you up their results pages. That is really all there is to it.

Read this article and you’ll learn the five ways in which you may use social media to rank your website up through the search engine results pages. This article assumes that all your social media profiles are linked to your website via your profile bios and such; otherwise, your efforts on social media will have a limited effect on your website’s search engine results standing.

Get involved with Google+

We all know that Google+ isn’t nearly as popular as Twitter, YouTube or Facebook, but having an account and sharing your pages on Google+ has its benefits. The biggest benefit is that Google will crawl and index your web pages very quickly if your posts with links, or if your page shares are re-shared by other people.

If as few as five people share your page link on Google+, you will often see your page crawled and indexed within 24 hours. Don’t believe me? Then try it for yourself.

Set up a Google+ profile and start posting interesting content to Google+ communities. Try to gain between 20 and 100 followers before you try sharing your web pages or page links.

Share something interesting and encourage people to share. The day after, go to Google and enter your web page URL in the search bar and you will see your web page indexed on the Google search engine.

 

Run tests by rewording your social media posts

The way you word your social media posts is going to affect how many people click your post links. However, there is no single rule for each social media profile. What works for one may not work for another.

When you post something on social media to make a point, try posting the same message again in a few days or weeks, but reword it differently. Try keeping it concise, try making it wordy, try making it funny, urgent and even risqué if you wish. Test and test again to see what types of posts your followers respond to.

Give people a reason to click on your social media links

Some social media gurus say that when you give somebody a reason to click on your social media post or your social media links, you are actually adding value to your post.

Don’t think of it as giving your followers an incentive to click your post. Think of it as adding a little sugar to your posts to sweeten them up a little. Here is a short list of the reasons/values that you may add to your posts to help make people more likely to click on them.

  • A link to a blog post
  • Fan or customer recognition/praise
  • Something funny that is related to your website or your industry
  • Video or a link to a video
  • An Infographic or a link to an Infographic
  • A question you want answered
  • Offering to answer a question for your followers
  • A National day that pertains to your products or your services you offer
  • A helpful tip, hack, technique or secret
  • An interesting or fun statistic or fact
  • Notification of an upcoming event you are hosting
  • Give people a behind-the-scenes look at your company
  • A company or product update (great example is Plagtracker’s service, paper editing at Help.Plagtracker – they created another service but with the same brand)
  • Add a cutting-edge or intriguing industry trend
  • Give people an exclusive offer or a link to one
  • Offer people a compelling quote from somebody popular or an industry leader
  • Issue a genuine press release that has usable information
  • A funny meme you created yourself that is related to your website or industry

There is no ideal word count for social media posts

Trying to figure out what word count is the most ideal for social media post is a big waste of time. Social media search engines are keyed in to promote profiles that post often and that post high quality content.

Posting spam, ads, and low quality posts will not help your website rank up the search engine results. You may also try dropping a few unnecessary words to help your posts flow a little smoother.

For example, the line above could go from “You may also try dropping a few unnecessary words to help your posts flow a little smoother.” to “Drop unnecessary words to make your posts flow smoothly.”

 

The statistics in the image above are genuine, but that doesn’t mean all your posts on Facebook should be 40 characters. It is better if you generate posts with varying word counts and then write your most important posts with just 40 characters. For example, if you have a fantastic special offer, then create a Facebook post with just 40 characters to tell people about it.

Post on social media daily – you don’t even need new content

Creating brand new content for your social media profiles is always a good thing, but few people have time to do it every day. Instead of creating brand new posts every day, simply share photos and images that are on your website articles and link back to the page they are located on.

Below is an image showing the photos and pictures on an online article. Most of the text has been removed to simply show the images on the article.

 

The article is from How to Choose a Used Car and the condensed image shows five different photos/images on the article. If you were the owner of that article, you could share the first picture on Monday to Facebook, the second image on Tuesday to Twitter, the third image on Wednesday to Pinterest and so on.

Just make sure that each time you share an image, you link back to its origin web page. Mix it up and try this trick with a number of your new and old articles.

New and original social media posts take time so on days where you do not have the time to create new social media content, simply recycle the photos/images on your articles. It gives you something to post, it helps keep your social media profiles active, and as a result, it helps you rank up the search engine results pages.

Conclusion – There are no rules set in stone

One hesitates to put up statistics about things such as how many words you should use when posting on Facebook for fear of the hundreds of readers who will go on to create all their Facebook posts with just 40 characters. There are no set rules. Your job is to experiment with trial and error until you find the posting and ranking levers/factors that suit your website.

About the author: Paula Hicks is an experienced content editor and journalist. Paula knows how to create great content marketing strategy for start-ups. Currently, she works as an editor and travels the South America. You may follow Paula on Twitter or add her on LinkedIn.