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Social Media and SEO are like the yin and yang of the online arena and one without the other cannot function adequately. Having your Social Media supporting your SEO is especially important, because its practice has changed considerably since the birth of SEO in the mid-1990s. But what made Google so popular — the ability to rank websites based on ‘popularity’ by crawling and weighing in bound links to any given website — has in a sense remained the same. What’s different is that the popularity of a website or brand these days is not only judged by its in-bound links, but also its Social Media impact and how well content is entwined with a brands website.

Search Engines do their best to build a holistic view of several brands before they present them to some of the 6 billion searches that are carried out every day. That’s why it’s really important to ensure your Social Media strategy is tangled with your SEO strategy, and every post should relate to what you are publishing on your website and the keywords which you are targeting. After all, there are several possible sources of traffic to your website. So what can be done to ensure your SEO and Social Media work well together?

1 - Devise a Content Marketing Strategy

You need to do the research and discover opportunities to spread new content. One of the many ways of doing this is to perform Blogger Outreach. Bloggers are like judges in a popularity contest, the more links and relevant content you have streaming back to your website and Social Media channels the better it will be for your brand and ranking chances for your target keywords.

2 – Optimize your Hashtags

Hashtags were first adopted by Twitter and were used to perform searches inside. However due to massive popularity, they have quickly been adopted by other social media platforms like Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest.

It’s highly advisable to perform hashtag keyword research through websites like Hashtatit and discover what kind of keywords your target audience could be searching for or are embedding into their online posts. Essentially by intelligently optimizing your hashtags will build your awareness within a specific group of people and attract attention to your brand.

3 – Embed Social Meta Tags in your Page Templates

Having social Meta tags within your websites code will automatically optimize your titles, descriptions, images and more information which is visible in social streams.

This ensures that whenever content is being shared from any given page, it will automatically be optimized with whatever keywords you have already targeted on that page.

4 - Optimize your Google properties 

(Google+, Google Places, YouTube, etc.)

Google has done whatever could be done to improve their presence in Social Media. This is great for SEO, because as all these platforms feed directly back to Google and they become an amazing opportunity to improve your rank by building relevancy and authority in search engines.

When you are building a Social Media strategy with SEO in mind, you have to make sure all Google entities are aligned with your SEO strategy. This can be done by building a content template which takes into consideration and aligns SEO keywords, (H1, H2, Title Tag, URL,), #tags, author link, descriptions and anchor text which will be embedded into Google entities and link back to your website.

These are just some of the techniques you can apply to your own brand. But the truth is the list is much longer than this and you have to be active on all prominent Social Media platforms at all times. If your website has a blog, a good idea will be to automatically link your blog posts with all your Social Media accounts, so that every time you publish a new article it can be automatically shared with your social audience and keep the stream of posts active and consistent.

Written by Ozal Ergen, SEO Manager at iProspect MENA