Social media is here to stay. The largest social networks (Facebook and Twitter) are only getting bigger. Since these social media websites are experiencing such incredible success, many other social “sharing” websites are also becoming extremely popular.

As time goes on, we should expect this kind of activity to continue. The largest social media websites will expand into other areas of the web and smaller social websites will fill in any gaps left by the larger companies.

Just one year ago, social media was optional for internet marketing and online business. Sure, it was highly recommended you incorporate social media into your SEO and marketing campaigns, but you could probably get away with not having your own social media pages and using only traditional SEO tactics.

Those days are over.

In other SEOSIteCheckUp articles, we’ve talked about how links may soon be replaced by social media votes.

It’s too soon to be sure, but it’s looking like the big search engines are moving in that direction. One thing we CAN be sure of, though, is that social media counts in SEO.

We don’t know the scope of it yet, but we do know websites with more Facebook “likes” and pages with more “tweets” are ranking higher than other websites with more backlinks. We know Google is giving a lot of authority to links coming from these social media websites, or “shares,” as they’re known within the world of social media.

If you continue using traditional SEO techniques (keyword research, backlinks, rinse and repeat), you’ll very likely be left in the dust. 

Google and the other big search engines have decided social media can be trusted more than backlinks. They might be right about it, too – there’s such a high volume of social media traffic, “gaming” the system is much more difficult.

At any rate, ignoring social media is no longer an insignificant problem associated with bad marketing. No, it’s a problem that, if it isn’t corrected, will send your website plummeting to the bottom of Google’s rankings. 

Unfortunately, many internet marketers and online business owners believe they’ve missed the boat with social media. Social media is evolving at an incredibly fast pace and we have no idea where it’s going to end up. For this reason, diving headfirst into social media now can be very intimidating. 

Just because it’s intimidating doesn’t mean you should avoid doing it, though – especially with something growing and changing this quickly.

Although social media is evolving quickly, it’s relatively easy to get up to speed. Yes, you will need to spend some time doing research. You will need to spend some time reading up on what experts are saying. You will need to do your own split testing with social media SEO strategies.

However, these are all things you would have to do with traditional SEO anyway! 

Here’s what you can do today to get yourself started on the social media path:

Create Social Media Pages and Accounts

First things first, you need to create pages and accounts for your websites or businesses. Thankfully, this is a very simple process that only takes a few minutes. Simply go to the major social media websites and click the “Create Account” button.

Follow the instructions and bingo, you’ve created a social media account!

Now, once you have these accounts, the learning curve starts to kick in. You need to get attention to your accounts or else they won’t help your business grow. Fortunately, there are many ways we can promote our social media pages.

SEOSiteCheckUp.com’s spent a long time figuring out how social media websites work. Check out the links at the end of the article to kick your social media page into high gear.

Create “Social” Content

If you’ve read any of the other articles we have on this site, you’ll know we strongly believe in creating excellent and unique content. Obviously, this is so your website will give real value to people who visit it.

There’s another side to it, though. If you write interesting content, the odds of it being “shared” on the social media web skyrocket. If you have dull content, there’s virtually no chance anyone will share it with their friends. 

Contrast this to traditional SEO strategies. With traditional SEO, it didn’t really matter what your content was as long as it was unique and contained keyword phrases. Of course the better the content, the more likely you were to gain a following, but for SEO purposes, it didn’t make a huge difference.

Things have changed. Writing for the social web needs to be a top priority. By doing this, you gain social links, shares and “likes” that will heavily impact your search engine rankings.

What’s Google Doing Next?

Although we can never predict exactly what Google will do next, we can tell you about news as soon as we hear about it.

Go to our new Facebook page (yeah, we’re late social media bloomers too) and toss us a “like” to be instantly updated whenever we find news on Google!

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