Many people working in SEO have ignored Social Media for a long time and seen it as something separate, another area of Internet Marketing but nothing to do with the important task of maximizing search engine rankings.
Businesses too who are unsure how to use Social Media often focus on SEO, Tampa businesses though can benefit from working with an SEO company who know what a benefit Social Media can be.
Social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook have no follow links, these are no use for SEO, Tampa businesses may assume that this means that there is no use in trying to get links on Facebook and Twitter back to a website.
The truth is of course that increasingly people search through social media sites to find what they want and look at what people are saying: people are more likely to trust a link recommended by a friend than trust one found on Google, this of course however isn’t SEO. Tampa based website owners may or may not realize though that Google looks at links on Social Media sites even if they are no follow.
Matt Cutts of Google in fact confirmed recently that Google’s spiders look at Social Media sites and look for links that are getting a lot of recommendations. What you ideally want for SEO is having your link posted by a large number of different users who aren’t all closely connected and which don’t post links too often. The higher profile that user is, i.e. how many people follow them and are friends with them, affects how important Google think the links they post are. These links won’t have an effect on Google Pagerank but will have an effect on rankings in Google results, which at the end of the day is what is important; it is also understood that the keywords in a post containing a link are considered to decide what specific terms Google will increase a page’s rank for.
There is another way in which Social Media can be used for SEO, Tampa businesses with new websites especially will benefit from this. The Social Media website Facebook has a pagerank of 9 on most pages, this means that it often outranks other pages. With a branded Facebook page especially, for a product, company or other brand, the Facebook page often outperforms the brand’s website: this is mildly irritating if the Facebook page is top and your page is second: what if you have a new website though and your page is on page 4? It may be that a Facebook page can get to the top of Google’s rankings a lot quicker, and if properly keyword researched may be able to outrank some of your competitors.
With this method of SEO Tampa businesses can use Facebook to get visitors to their website rather than their competitors via a Facebook page that directs people to their website if needed; for some businesses however all the important, necessary information such as a telephone number and address can be given on the Facebook page.
