Dominating Search Engine Results with Social Media

SMOYou probably have heard that the search engines love social media. What you may not know is why and what it can mean for your business. Most people think it is because the search engines like all of the fresh new content that social media sites provide. The truth is that this is only a fraction of it. The real reason that social media sites score well in search engine ranking is because of the authority of the social site itself. Hundreds of thousands of sites all linking to the social media sites are what makes them extremely popular in the eyes of the search engines. Therefore, all those links translate into authority.

What I am about to reveal to you is unknown to most and yet one of the most powerful techniques used to dominate search results. We all know that optimizing our sites can take a long time to build up authority to be able to complete for highly prized keyword terms. But if you use the authority of an existing social media site, you can get to the top much quicker!

If you take your content and place it on your social media pages and then optimize your pages for your desired keywords, you may be shocked at how quickly you will see results. In a moment I will tell you exactly how to do this optimization on your own social media pages, but for now imagine the following.

How would it look if your ideal prospect went online to Google and typed in a search phrase describing your product or service and received a results page that showed only your business? That would literally leave them nowhere else to turn. You have probably never heard of such a thing and are now wondering if it is even possible. Well let me tell you, it is possible and I am about to share with you how I do it.

Optimizing a social media page is not complicated. There are two key factors that will shoot you up to the top. The first and biggest optimization factor is the title of the page. The strategy is simple. Just get your main keyword or phrase into the title of your page by naming your pages using your keywords or at least having the keywords in the page names. This automatically puts them into the title. Most social media sites allow this and most people don’t take advantage of it. Most people use their  business or company name, which is great if your brand is a household name, but in most cases your target audience knows to search for you by the products or services that you offer.

Second, once you have your primary keyword phrase in your title, it is time to start telling the search engines what this page is about and why they should notice. This is accomplished by going out and getting other sites to link back to your social media page with the same clickable text that matches your target keyword phrase. This is known as an anchor text link and simply means it is the clickable text to link to another page. When the search engine sees other sites using a particular phrase as an anchor text link to your site, they recognize that and count that as a vote of popularity towards your social media page. The more popular it appears, the higher and faster it will climb. These two factors combined with the authority of the social site itself will literally launch your page to the top.

Now obviously all these links do not count equally, but this is the basic idea.  The page at the end of the day with the most points wins. The links on higher priority pages will count for more points and have more value.

So these are the basic principles of getting a social media page to the top of the search results now let’s talk strategy and how we will use this knowledge to dominate the search results.

There are a ton of these high authority social media sites out there but all you need is 10 to take over the first page of the search engines. These are in no particular order but just to name a few off the top might be, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Squidoo, MySpace, EzineArticles, and the list goes on and on. It typically doesn’t matter which ones you use, just pick 10 of them.

Now sign up for all those free accounts and name your pages appropriately as you learned earlier. Next let’s put some good content on those pages with a strong call to action. This is where most people blow it. They drive traffic to pages that lead nowhere and don’t have a clear purpose for the viewer. You really need to tell them what to do. My preference is to have them opt in to receive some piece of valuable information I am offering to get them into my sales funnel. Video works best for this and is right in line with all this social media stuff. So use video to tell them what to do and offer it as your teaser. You will get allot more optins to see the continuation of a great content delivery video that anything else. Start off with video explaining something of extreme value to your market and then offer them more or the second half if they put in their email address. Think of it as a cliffhanger!

Okay now that you have your ten social media pages up it is time to start linking to them. There are many ways to do this and it can be allot of work. Don’t worry, this is a perfect job for you to outsource. Believe me; you will not enjoy this mind numbing work. You are going to want to get this job outsourced.

These are just a few of the places you can go to get these links and they are all free with the exception of the time it takes to do it. In addition, you can find many places to post comments with links.

  • Forums and Message Boards
  • Video Sites
  • Articles
  • Press Releases

There are literally millions of places you can go to put your links.

It is these very anchor text links pointing to your social media pages that will tell the search engines that these pages are popular for your keyword phrases and will help to drive them up to the top.

Imagine all of your social media pages showing up in search results and  pushing your competitors off the page leaving only your sites in the top results. How would that change your business?

It almost seems like an unfair advantage doesn’t it?