Is social media only about being social – or is there more to it than that?

While it is true that social media can convert Twitter or FaceBook followers and friends into customers; and it is also true that these social media channels offer a great way of staying in-touch with these customers as well as cultivate new ones through lead-generation – but there is something else social media can do – and it’s a game changer.

Social media activity can increase your ranking on Google and nearly every other search engine and drive more traffic to your website and ultimately to your door – and that’s exactly why we have a web site; isn’t it?

I’m sure to get some comments on this statement, but it’s OK to post on social media sites with the sole intention of effecting higher search engine rankings and without intending on being social.

The job of crafting words on a web page (or online profile or social media post) with the purpose of increasing search engine ranking is referred to as Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  The art of word-crafting is referred to as “phraseology”, and it’s interesting to note that SEO is an integral part of phraseology – literally.

Understanding the specific set of standards and using phraseology when posting messages on social media channels – like Twitter and FaceBook, are a great way to boost your search engine ranking AND give you more exposure on the search engine results page – referred to in the marketing industry as SERP.

Google recently made some significant changes in the way it ranks websites and in a surprising statement cited – among other things – that being active in social media will positively reward a website’s ranking.  I’m paraphrasing here, but that’s the gist.

Google, Bing, and Yahoo! are the three biggies when it comes to search engines – nearly everything else is somehow connected to them.  Each search engine has a different set of rules and standards when it comes to website listings, and these standards change often.

The days of establishing a website and leaving it there to do its job are gone.  Today’s websites need up-keeping to stay current with the latest code and listing standards in order to maintain good search engine ranking.  For instance – a website title needs to be crafted within a specific character length and of sufficient keyword density (having enough relevant key words – aka: search words) to be considered by Google for better ranking, too short or long in character length and you’ll suffer a low ranking.  Bing will ding you for having too many characters in apage description, and Yahoo! will drop rank for stuffing too many key words into a web page – a tactic called “keyword stuffing” which was a widely published SEO strategy until recently banned by Google with their new Caffeine algorithm (that’s the tool that spiders websites to rank them for inclusion on the search results page).

The kicker here is that there are no playbooks for this SEO stuff as each search engine considers the details of how they rank businesses to be proprietary and confidential business intelligence.  Hiring an experienced SEO marketer for your online activity who keeps up with these standards and best-practices can really pay dividends…

So, the next time you’re crafting words for your website, your social media profile, or the next time you post a message on Twitter or FaceBook consider phraseology and remember – you don’t always have to be social in social media.

By: Chris Sheehy – Auto Body Consultant at Autobody Consulting Group LLC www.AutobodyConsultingGroup.com

Autobody Consulting Group, a business operations, administrative, production, estimating, management, marketing, and social media consultancy serving auto body collision repair businesses and vendors to the autobody industry.

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