Social Media SEO- What It Is and Why SEO Content Writers Need to Know About It

Aug. 29, 2012 - PRLog -- Search engine optimization (SEO) is a constantly changing field because it encompasses guidelines that change all the time. Hence, it’s not a topic you can learn about once and be done with. One of the latest trends to come on the scene is social media SEO (aka SM SEO).

3 Reasons It’s Important for SEO Content Writers to Know What Social Media SEO Is

If you’re an SEO content writer, it’s particularly important to know about this, not only because your clients expect you to, but also for the following reasons.

(i) Bundle services: You can offer social media services right alongside your SEO article writing services;

(ii) Bill more: Building on the last point, upselling existing clients is one of the easiest ways to make more money as an SEO writer, without doing any additional marketing; and

(iii) Client retention: The more you showcase your worth to clients – and the more services you can provide them -- the more likely they are to stay with you.

Now that you understand why it’s important to know what social media SEO is all about, let’s define it.

Social Media SEO Defined

In simple layman’s terms, this form of SEO is simply the practice of search engines (eg, Google, Bing, Yahoo!) using data gleaned from social media sites (eg, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) to rank sites.

How Search Engines Use Social Media (SEO) Data to Rank Sites

Search engines use many factors to determine how to rank a site, eg, the quality of the content, how often it’s updated, the number of backlinks it has pointing to it; etc. Now, some social media data is being added to this mix. Let’s use Twitter as an example.

Let’s say that as an SEO content writer, you have a client that you write weekly blog posts for and every time you write a post and the client publishes it, it gets retweeted “a bunch of times,” eg, on average of 50-75 times per week.

Now, let’s also assume that not only is the post retweeted this often, but it’s retweeted by well-respected website owners in your client’s niche who each have a lot of followers on Twitter (eg, 5,000+).

In essence, Twitter is providing backlinks to your client’s sites. Backlinks are a critical part of the SEO content creation guidelines search engines like Google use to find and rank sites. Well, a search engine like Google will factor this data into their ranking algorithm and say:

Hmmm . . . this site must be popular because the content posted there gets shared (retweeted) a lot. Furthermore, the people who are retweeting this content are popular Twitter account holders (ie, they have a lot of followers) in the same niche. So, let’s rank this site -- Site A -- higher than Site B because even though Site B has good content, it’s not getting shared a lot.

And that’s how social media SEO can affect a site’s ranking. See how social media goes hand-in-hand with SEO content writing – and why clients are willing to pay for it?
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About the Author: Yuwanda Black heads New Media Words (NewMediaWords.biz), an SEO writing company. She’s the author of over 50 ebooks, including one on starting a home-based business offering social media management services entitled, "How to Earn $100-$300 Per Hour as a Social Media Consultant."  

Learn more at http://inkwelleditorial.com/freelance-writers-how-to-make....