Social Media SEO Generate More Traffic for Your Website

Introduction

In the movie Avengers: Infinity War, while all avengers were struggling fighting with Thanos and his army of zombies from outer space, Thor, out of nowhere, came to rescue the Avengers and began demolishing the space creatures in dozens with his prized “Strom-breaker”. He could wield the “Storm-Breaker” to such an extent that he even struck the mighty ax into Thanos’s chest. Here “Storm-Breaker” is the tool that came into play in terms of bringing the war of Wakanda to the Avengers’ side. What if there is such a tool that can bring the game of website optimization as well as search engine

 optimization to your side? Well, I’m glad to let the believers know that there is such a tool that can be your “Storm-Breaker”. And the tool is Social Media SEO.

Intersecting Social Media SEO

To dive into the sea that is social media SEO, we must analyze the term, and then we can have a better understanding of it.

Social Media

Social media are interactive technologies that allow people to create and share information, ideas, hobbies, and other kinds of expression via virtual communities and networks. While the range of stand-alone and built-in social media services currently available poses issues to the definition of social media, there are certain similar features such as:

• Social media are Web 2.0 Internet-based interactive apps.
• The lifeblood of social media is user-created content, which includes written postings or comments, digital photographs or videos, and data generated by all online activities.
• Users build service-specific profiles for the social media organization’s website or app, which are developed and maintained by the social media organization.
• By integrating a user’s profile with those of other individuals or groups, social media aids in the development of online social networks.

Why We Use Them

Users typically access social media services via web-based desktop software or by downloading services that provide social media capabilities to their mobile devices (e.g., smartphones and tablets). When users connect with these electronic services, they provide highly interactive platforms on which individuals, communities, and organizations can exchange, co-create, discuss, participate in, and edit user-generated or self-curated content that has been placed online. Furthermore, social media is used to chronicle memories, learn about and explore new things, advertise oneself, and friendships can be formed, as well as ideas can be developed, through the creation of blogs, podcasts, films, and gaming sites.

The burgeoning area of technological self-studies is focused on the changing relationship between humans and technology. Facebook (and its linked Facebook Messenger), TikTok, WeChat, Instagram, QZone, Weibo, Twitter, Tumblr, Baidu Tieba, and LinkedIn are among the most popular social networking websites, with over 100 million registered or listed members. Other popular platforms that are occasionally referred to as social media services include YouTube, QQ, Quora, Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, LINE, Snapchat, Pinterest, Viber, Reddit, Discord, VK, Microsoft Teams, and others, depending on interpretation. Wikis are one type of collaborative content creation tool.

Many social media outlets differ from traditional media in a variety of ways, including quality, reach, frequency, usability, relevancy, and permanence (e.g., print newspapers as well as magazines, radio as well as TV broadcasts).

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing the quality and quantity of internet traffic from search engines to a website or web page. The search engine optimization (SEO) strategy focuses on organic (sometimes known as “natural” or “organic”) traffic rather than sponsored or direct website traffic. Unpaid website traffic can come from a variety of sources, including image and video searches, academic and news searches, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

SEO evaluates how search engines work, the computer-programmed algorithms that govern search engine behavior, what people search for, the actual search phrases or keywords placed into search engines, and which search engines are chosen by their targeted audience. SEO is done because websites that rank higher on search engine results pages receive more visitors from search engines (SERP). These visitors may then be converted into clients.

SEM and SEO

SEO is not an appropriate technique for every website, and other Internet marketing strategies, such as paid advertising through pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, may be more beneficial, depending on the site operator’s aims. SEM (search engine marketing) is the process of planning, implementing, and optimizing search engine advertising campaigns (SEM). Its distinction from SEO is best illustrated by contrasting paid and unpaid priority ranking in search results. SEM emphasizes prominence above relevancy; website developers should prioritize SEM with regard to visibility, as most users navigate to the top results of their search. Building high-quality web pages to engage and persuade internet users, setting up analytics packages to allow site owners to measure results.

Google made available to the public a full 160-page version of their Search Quality Rating Guidelines in November 2015, revealing a shift in their emphasis on “usefulness” and mobile local search. As revealed by StatCounter in October 2016, when they examined the mobile market, the mobile market has exploded in recent years, surpassing desktop usage. A survey run by 2.5 million websites discovered that 51.25 percent of the pages were loaded by a mobile device.

Google is one of the corporations that is capitalizing on the increase in mobile usage by pushing websites to utilize their Google Search Console, the Mobile-Friendly Test, which allows businesses to compare their websites to search engine results and assess how user-friendly their websites are. The more closely related the keywords are, the higher their ranking will be based on key phrases.

Here SEM and SEO are differentiated below.

SEM	SEO
Its object is to help build connections	Its object is to get as many visitors as possible for a website
Helps users create a virtual community	Optimizes search engines
Users can interact with each other as well as share knowledge and ideas	Users or the site owner can get expected traffic by implementing it
It serves as a medium for SEO.	The methods can be implemented using Social media.

 

Social Media SEO

The search business is constantly buzzing about how social media might impact SEO. Social media SEO refers to how social media activities can increase organic website traffic to your website via search engines. It’s a theme that appears in countless case studies and never gets old. The explanation is straightforward: social media is vital for SEO in more ways than one. It not only makes your SEO actions more effective but also more profitable. Yes, social media and SEO may appear to be diametrically opposed, but there is no doubt that they complement each other.

However, contrary to popular assumptions, social media has no direct impact on SEO. In other words, social media signals have no direct impact on your search engine rankings. The links you publish on Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest may help your company get awareness. However, they aren’t observed as a ranking indicator by Bing’s or Google’s algorithms. Now, here’s the thing: while social media isn’t a ranking component on the surface, it does have meaning if you dig deeper.

It has an indirect favorable effect on a page’s search ranking. So, certainly, there is a link between a site’s ranking in the SERPs and the number of social signals it has. If you look at the websites that rank high in Google searches, you will see that many of them have strong social signals. So, if you invest in a social media marketing strategy as a marketer, you are essentially enhancing your chances of ranking well in search engines.

Why Does Google Disregard Social Signals?

Do Google crawl and index Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn profiles/pages? Yes, of course, it does. Is it any different when it comes to a piece of content and the links that are placed on it? No, it treats them the same as any other HTML page on a website. When it comes to social signals, Google does not evaluate the number of social media shares or followers when ranking a web domain. Because it would be far too simple for someone to game the system and have an undeserving site rank higher than a deserving one.

It’s also worth noting that social media sharing occurs 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And they happen faster than Google can catch up, making it tough for the search engine behemoth to crawl and keep track of them. We don’t know how much data Google has access to from the major “must-login” social media sites, nor do we know if it’s used for ranking purposes. What we do know is that social media can help people locate your brand in search engine results in an indirect way. And for the time being, that’s all that matters.

Here are the short descriptions of some of the prominent Social Media SEO websites:

I. Twitter

Twitter is a microblogging and social networking website based in the United States, where users post and engage with messages known as “tweets.” Twitter is accessed by users either through browser or mobile frontend applications or programmatically via its APIs. Twitter, Inc., a corporation established in San Francisco, California, provides the service, which has more than 26 offices across the world. Tweets were previously limited to 140 characters, but in November 2017, the limit was increased to more than 270 for non-CJK languages. Most accounts continue to limit audio and video tweets to 140 seconds.

By 2012, the site had more than 101 million users posting more than 339 million tweets per day, and it handled an average of 1.6 billion search queries per day.  Twitter had over 331 million monthly active users as of the first quarter of 2019. In practice, a small number of users write the great majority of tweets.

Accounts can be set to “protected,” which limits this information (and all tweets) to approved followers. Information about who has decided to follow an account and who a user has chosen to follow is publicly available. Twitter gathers personally identifiable information from its users and shares it with third parties in accordance with its privacy policies. If the firm changes hands, the provider maintains the right to sell this information as an asset. While Twitter does not display advertising, advertisers can target users based on their tweet history and may cite tweets in ads tailored directly to the person.

II. Facebook

Meta Platforms owns Facebook, an American online social media and social networking website. Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in 2004 with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. Membership was formerly restricted to Harvard students but has now expanded to include students from other North American colleges and, since 2006, anybody over the age of 13. As Facebook had around 2.8 billion monthly active users as of 2020, It ranked eighth in worldwide internet usage. It was the most downloaded mobile app in the decade 2010.

Facebook can be accessed via Internet-connected devices such as personal computers, tablets, and smartphones. After registration, individuals can construct a profile that includes personal information. They can exchange text, photographs, and multimedia with other users who have consented to be their “friend” or, depending on the privacy settings, openly.

Facebook has been the subject of numerous controversies, including user privacy (as with the Cambridge Analytica data scandal), political manipulation (as with the 2016 U.S. elections), mass surveillance, psychological effects like addiction and low self-esteem, and content like fake news, conspiracy theories, copyright infringement, and hate speech. Commentators have accused Facebook of knowingly enabling the spread of such content, as well as inflating its user base in order to attract advertisers.

Each registered Facebook user has a personal profile that displays their posts and material. In September 2011, the style of individual user pages was updated and became known as “Timeline,” a chronological feed of a user’s stories, including status updates, images, app interactions, and events. Users now have greater privacy options. Facebook Pages were introduced in 2007 as a way for brands and celebrities to communicate with their followers. In November, almost 100,000 Pages were launched. In June 2009, Facebook launched the “Usernames” function, which allows users to select a unique nickname to be used in the URL for their personal profile, enabling simpler sharing.

Facebook enhanced the gender option in February 2014, adding a custom input area that allows users to select from a wide range of gender identities. Users can also specify which set of gender-specific pronouns should be used in their name throughout the site. In May 2014, Facebook added a function that allows users to request information that other users have not shared on their accounts. If a user fails to disclose critical information, such as location, hometown, or relationship status, other users can utilize a new “ask” button to send a message to the user in a single click, inquiring about that item.

III. Quora

Quora is a social question-and-answer website based in Mountain View, California, that caters to people from all over the world. It was established on June 25, 2009, and made public on June 21, 2010. Users can work together by modifying questions and commenting on answers submitted by other users. By 2020, the website had 300 million monthly visitors.

Prior to April 19, 2021, Quora required users to register with their full names rather than using an Internet alias (screen name); while no name verification is required, the community can report fictitious screen names. This was done ostensibly to boost the credibility of answers. Users that have a particular amount of activity on the website can write their responses anonymously, however, this is not the default setting. [Citation required] Visitors who refuse to log in or utilize cookies have had to use workarounds to access the site. Users can also use the OpenID protocol to log in with their Google or Facebook accounts. The Real Name policy will be repealed on April 19, 2021.

Some well-known people in the Quora community include Jimmy Wales, Richard A. Muller, Clayton C. Anderson, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Adrián Lamo, as well as current and past professional athletes, scientists, and other specialists in their professions.

Users on Quora can build user profiles with visible real names, photos, site usage statistics, and so on, which they can turn private. Blogger Ivan Kirigin pointed out in August 2012 that acquaintances and followers could see his activities, including which queries he had looked at. Later that month, Quora stopped showing question views in feeds in reaction. Quora exposes its users’ profiles, including their real names, to search engines by default. This feature can be turned off by the user.

IV. Reddit

In the United States, Reddit is a social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website that focuses on user-generated content. Registered users upload content to the site, such as links, text entries, photographs, and videos, which are then rated positively or negatively by other users. Posts are sorted by subject into user-created boards known as “communities” or “subreddits”. They cover a wide range of topics including news, video games, religion, science, politics, movies, music, books, cuisine, sports, fitness, pets, and image-sharing.

Submissions with the most up-votes appear towards the top of their subreddit and, if enough up-votes are received, eventually on the site’s front page. Although there are severe restrictions against harassment, it still occurs, and Reddit moderators moderate the communities on occasion, closing or restricting them. Moderation is also carried out by community-specific moderators, who are not Reddit employees.

According to Alexa Internet, Reddit is the 19th most-visited website in the world and the 7th most-visited website in the United States as of September 2021. The United States accounts for around 42o49.3 percent of its user base, followed by the United Kingdom at 7.9–8.2 percent and Canada at 5.2–7.8 percent. Reddit is used on a regular basis by 22% of US people aged 18 to 29, and 14% of US adults aged 30 to 49.

In 2005, University of Virginia roommates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, along with Aaron Swartz, launched Reddit. In October 2006, Condé Nast Publications purchased the site. 2011 marked the year that Reddit was spun off as an independent subsidiary of Advance Publications, Condé Nast’s parent company. Reddit received $50 million in fundraising in October 2014, led by Sam Altman, and includes investors Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Ron Conway, Snoop Dogg, and Jared Leto.

The company was valued at $500 million at the time of its investment. Reddit raised $200 million in July 2017 for a $1.8 billion value, with Advance Publications maintaining the primary owner.  A $700 million investment round headed by Fidelity Investments in August 2021 increased that valuation to more than $10 billion.

V. YouTube

YouTube is a Google-owned video-sharing and social media network based in the United States. Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim founded it on February 14, 2005.  YouTube has over a billion monthly subscribers who collectively watch over a billion hours of video per day.  As of May 2019, more than 500 hours of video content were being uploaded per minute.

YouTube was acquired by Google for $1.66 billion. Google’s ownership of YouTube has also altered the company’s business strategy; it no longer relies solely on advertising revenue. YouTube has begun charging for premium content such as movies and exclusive content. YouTube and approved producers are both members of Google’s AdSense program, which benefits both parties by increasing revenue. It has subsequently grown from a tiny video streaming platform to a huge service expected to generate $19.8 billion in revenue by 2020.

Since Google acquired YouTube, the company has expanded beyond the website to include mobile applications, network television, and the capacity to integrate with other services. On YouTube, there are numerous video genres, including music videos, video clips, news, short films, feature films, documentaries, audio recordings, movie trailers, teasers, live streams, and vlogs. Collaborations between YouTubers and corporate sponsors are an example of this. Since 2015, big media companies such as Disney, ViacomCBS, and WarnerMedia have launched and grown their corporate YouTube accounts in order to reach a broader audience.

YouTube has had a historic social impact, affecting popular culture, and internet trends, and spawning multimillionaire personalities. YouTube has been heavily criticized despite its development and success. YouTube has been criticized for facilitating the dissemination of misinformation, copyright breaches, frequent violations of its users’ privacy, allowing censorship, and compromising the safety and well-being of children.

On September 13, 2016, YouTube introduced the public beta of Community, a social media-based feature that enables users to share text, images (including GIFs), and live videos under a dedicated “Community” tab on their channel. Prior to the release, several YouTube creators were consulted to suggest tools that would be beneficial to Community; these creators included Vlogbrothers, The Koons, AsapScience, The Game Theorists, Lilly Singh, Karmin, The Key of Awesome, Peter Hollens, Rosianna Halse Rojas, Sam Tsui, Threadbanger, and Vsauce3.

Channels that enable the community tab to have their channel conversations (referred to as “channel comments” prior to the March 2013 “One channel layout” redesign finalization) permanently deleted, rather than coexisting or moving.

VI. Instagram

Instagram is a social networking website for sharing photos and videos founded by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger in the United States. Facebook Inc. purchased the service in April 2012 for around $1 billion in cash and equity. The software enables users to post photos and videos that may be modified with filters and grouped using hashtags and geotagging. Public posts can be shared with all followers or with pre-approved followers. Users can browse the material of other users using tags and locations, as well as view trending content.

Also, Instagram initially distinguished itself by requiring content to be framed in a square (1:1) aspect ratio with a width of 640 pixels to match the width of the iPhone’s display at the time. These limits were relaxed in 2015 with a resolution upgrade to 1080 pixels. The service also added messaging capabilities, the ability to combine multiple images or videos into a single post and a “stories” feature similar to Snapchat’s main competitor—which allows users to upload photos and videos to a sequential feed, with each post accessible to others for a 24-hour period after it is published. As of January 2019, the Stories feature was being used on a daily basis by 500 million users.

Instagram began as an iOS app in October 2010 and quickly grew in popularity, reaching one million registered users in two months, ten million in a year, and one billion in June 2018. In April 2012, an Android version was published, followed by a feature-limited desktop interface in November 2012, and a Fire OS app in June 2014. As of October 2015, there were approximately 40.5 billion photographs uploaded. While Instagram has been lauded for its popularity, it has come under fire for a variety of reasons, including its negative impact on youths’ mental health, policy and interface changes, allegations of censorship, and user-uploaded illegal or improper content.

Cristiano Ronaldo, a Portuguese professional footballer, is the most followed person with 373 million followers as of December 2021. As of January 14, 2019, the most-liked photo on Instagram is a photograph of an egg shared by the account @world_record_egg, which was created with the express intention of breaking Kylie Jenner’s previous record of 18 million likes. As of January 2019, the image had accumulated more than 55 million likes. The second most-liked photo is of Ariana Grande and her husband Dalton Gomez at their wedding. In the 2010s, Instagram was the fourth most downloaded mobile application.

Distinguished social media YouTube and Instagram are differentiated below.

YouTube	Instagram
Don’t need a user account to browse the site	Need a user account to browse the site
There is an option to stream live	No such options are available
There is an option to stream from the mobile app with a new user account	There is an option to stream from a mobile app with a new user account.

 

VII. Pinterest

Pinterest is an image-sharing and social media service that enables users to save and find information (particularly “ideas”) on the internet through the use of photographs and, on a lesser scale, animated GIFs and videos organized in pinboards. Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp founded the site, which had over 478 million monthly active users worldwide as of March 2021. It is maintained by a San Francisco-based company named Pinterest, Inc.

Pinterest’s creators described the service as a “library of ideas” that encourages users to “go out and execute that thing,” according to the company’s website. Despite the fact that it is not a “social network” based on images. Additionally, it has a big fashion profile. Pinterest has also been referred to as a “visual search engine” in recent years.

As we all know, Pinterest mainly consists of “pins” as well as “boards.” A pin is a picture that has been linked to or posted on a website. Repinning is the process of saving pins from one user’s board to another user’s board. Boards are groups of pins organized around a common theme, such as quotations, travel, or weddings. Numerous idea boards can contain multiple sections, each of which can hold multiple pins.

Pinterest’s creators described the service as a “library of ideas” that encourages users to “go out and execute that thing,” according to the company’s website. It can be downloaded to the bookmark bar of a web browser or put directly on a website by a webmaster. It was previously called the “Pin it” button but was changed to “Save” in 2016 as the site expanded internationally, making it more intuitive for new users. Pinterest announced a video player in August 2016 that enables users and brands to upload and store files of any length directly to the site.

VIII. Medium

Medium is an open platform where readers can discover new ways of thinking and professional and emerging writers may share creative writing on virtually any subject. Create an account on Medium to begin syndicating your content. The “Import a Story” page includes an “Import a Story” button. That button should be clicked. Bear in mind that you can syndicate content only if you own it. Make a point of avoiding the use of other people’s content. Additionally, consider items that are easily shared. Enter the URL of the article or blog post you wish to syndicate. Medium uploads and organizes your material with the dexterity of a magician. Take a quick go at the new Medium piece to ensure everything is formatted appropriately.

Additionally, you’ll notice “Originally published at” and the URL of your website at the end of this piece. Bear in mind that Google wants you to take steps to ensure that your high-quality content remains the work’s “master copy.” Additionally, readers of your Medium post may choose to visit your website via the link.

IX. Vimeo

Vimeo, Inc. is a New York City-based video hosting, sharing, and services platform. Vimeo is a video platform that specializes in delivering high-definition video to a variety of devices. Vimeo’s subscribers get access to tools for video creation, editing, and broadcasting, as well as enterprise software solutions and a platform for video professionals to communicate with clients and other professionals.

Jake Lodwick and Zach Klein founded the site in 2004 as a spin-off of CollegeHumor to distribute comedic videos among colleagues, but it was placed on hold to support CollegeHumor’s expanding popularity. IAC purchased CollegeHumor and Vimeo in 2006, and following Google’s acquisition of YouTube for more than US$1.66 billion, IAC increased its focus on Vimeo to compete with YouTube, focusing on curating content and providing high-definition video to differentiate itself from other video-sharing sites. By 2009, Lodwick and Klein had departed, and IAC had established a more corporate-focused structure to expand Vimeo’s services, with current CEO Anjali Sud in place since July 2017. Vimeo will be spun out from IAC as a separate public business in May 2021.

By December 2013, Vimeo had grown to over 101 million monthly unique visitors and over 22 million registered members. At the time, mobile devices accounted for 15% of Vimeo’s traffic. Vimeo accounted for 0.12 percent of total Internet traffic in February 2013, lagging well behind larger competitors YouTube and Facebook. Vimeo is a network of independent filmmakers and their fans. The Vimeo community has acquired the moniker “Vimeans,” which refers to members of the Vimeo community who are regularly engaged with other users.

According to Glenn Schiffman, Chief Financial Officer of IAC, enterprise customers were Vimeo’s fastest-growing revenue sector in 2019. As of April 2019, CTO Mark Kornfilt stated that the company has approximately 1 million users, accounting for the majority of the company’s yearly revenue of US$160 million. By March 2020, this figure had risen to over 1.22 million, with over US$200 million in yearly revenue. By April 2020, the site had also surpassed 175 million registered users. And over 200 million by November 2020, owing to an increase in Vimeo usage as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The company had approximately 1.59 million paying subscribers ahead of going public.

X. DeviantArt

DeviantArt (previously deviantART) is an American online art community that focuses on artwork, filmmaking, and photography. It is a subsidiary of the Israeli firm Wix.com. Angelo Sotira, Scott Jarkoff, Matthew Stephens, and others founded it on August 7, 2000.

DeviantArt, Inc. is located in Los Angeles, California, near the Hollywood district. Fella, a little, devil-like robotic figure, served as the website’s official mascot. By 2008, DeviantArt had surpassed 36 million monthly visitors. Daily, DeviantArt members submitted over 1.4 million favorites and approximately 1.51 million comments in 2010. In 2011, it was the twelfth largest social network by weekly visitors, with approximately 3.81 million. Several years later, the site surpassed 25.2 million subscribers and 250.3 million submissions in 2017. On February 23, 2017, the company announced a $36 million acquisition by Wix.com.

Approximately 359 million photographs have been contributed to the site by the site’s over 35 million registered members. By July 2011, DeviantArt had grown to become the world’s largest online art community. Members of DeviantArt have the ability to offer comments and critiques on individual deviation pages, allowing the site to be referred to as a “[free] peer evaluation application.” Along with textual criticism, DeviantArt now allows for the submission of a small image as a remark.

This can be accomplished with the use of a DeviantArt Muro option, which is a browser-based drawing tool developed and hosted by DeviantArt. However, only DeviantArt members have the ability to save their work as deviations. Another Muro feature is “Redraw,” which captures the user as they draw their image and then allows the user to share the entire process as a film variation. In late 2013, a few artists began experimenting with using breakfast cereal as the subject of their works, albeit this trend has only recently begun to spread.

Ending Remarks

Social Media SEO is, in a broader sense, a part of Off-page search engine optimization. Sharing links to a particular internet site makes the website more familiar to Google. And so new posts, as well as content, get indexed faster. And the sooner the posts get exposure, the more the posts get visitors. And with these baby steps, the posts get the top position on search engine results eventually. All the process needs are consistency.