SEO sounds intimidating when first looked at, but it's really not too difficult of a concept to understand. The acronym stands for search engine optimization and encompasses a wide range of activities that deal with raising a site's standing when people search certain terms on Google or other search engines.
Whatever your website/business is about, social media pages are a requirement. However, different social media platforms require different approach strategies to achieve maximum effectiveness. We'll start with the largest:
Facebook
The king of social media, Facebook requires far more than simply posting links to your website on your page. You could buy ads on Facebook to reach more users, but I prefer a more organic, ground up, multi-pronged approach.
Step 1: Dissecting your post
Begin by searching the topic of your news article on Facebook. This could be one word, or a few words, which must be searched individually. Once you type it in the search bar, click "Pages", and then open any fan pages related to the topic. Copy the link to your website or the Facebook post (by clicking on the time stamp) and post in 2 places:
1. On the Facebook page you just opened
2. In a reply to the most liked comment or 2nd most liked comment on the most recent post of the FB page you just opened, depending on which one has fewer replies.
By doing this, users will see your link when they click on "View more comments" and can follow the link to your page. Users following a link to your website or FB page will raise the search ranking of both.
Posting on FB pages of news sites yields the best results. The 1st comment is prime real estate and being lucky and quick enough to post it equals a few thousand or even million impressions for your brand or site.
Warning: To get around the spam filter on Facebook when posting a comment reply, post a few words (and maybe a smiley) before your link. You can react to the post, tell people your link is related, or say it's an "update" to the situation.
Step 2: Join FB Groups
Facebook groups are user created and can sometimes have thousands to tens of thousands of followers. Search ones that are related to your niche, state, country, whatever. Then join all those groups and post links to your website or FB page. The trick is to post in a manner that makes it seem legit, humanlike, and non-spammy. You could make a fake FB profile for this, but if you join too many groups too quickly, the account will be unable to post in groups for 1-2 weeks.
Another key to effective use of FB groups is the ability to edit the title, photo, and description when posting a link to a website. For my personal website, I enjoy making catchy titles, even though they may be misconstrued as clickbait. However, with FB groups, you can make the titles as clickbaity as possible to entice clicks and nobody will know that it was posted by the website owner, since FB Pages cannot post in groups (only actual profiles can). The website will be cleaner and have a higher reputation due to the lack of clickbait titles (even though you are secretly sharing in groups under a different name using clickbait titles).
Step 3: Message page owners
Although most will not respond, this can be an effective strategy to increase impressions, or if you get lucky, double or even triple your audience. What I did was find every fan page that was tangentially related to mind and send them a message asking me if I could become an admin to help post. While most of them didn't respond, I did become the admin of 3 new unofficial fan pages, 1 of which was the same size of my current page. Through some mass messaging, I over doubled my audience reach. Asking page owners to share your links if they find any interesting can also yield results.
Step 4: Link your FB page to your website
This can be done in the page settings.
Step 5: Branding and design
Change the cover and profile picture of your page to include your website logo or name. Having the full website name in the cover photo is a must. The profile picture can contain the logo or the full name.
Step 6: Effective posts
When a link is typed into the post on your Facebook page, 3 things will open in the post box: a photo, a title, and a description. If these don't show up, then refresh the page and type the link into the box again. If any of the info does not appear or is incorrect, then use the Facebook Developer scraping tool to figure out the problem. Although you can change the picture, title, and description box yourself, when other people share the link, they will see the original, unchanged, format. Nobody wants ugly links and if there's no photo, you might as well not even post. Problems with the link can be fixed by altering your website's Open Graph meta tags.
Facebook is not a standalone tool, meant to be used alone. It is merely one of many platforms that must be understood and mastered to be used to its full potential. There are more Facebook SEO tips, but those will be covered in Part 2. Look forward to upcoming Easy SEO guides for the following social media sites as well:
Twitter
Tumblr
Instagram
Youtube
Reddit
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