Today’s guest blog post comes from Gillian Muessig, President and Co-Founder of SEOMoz.
Write great content, promote it, and you will be rewarded with inbound links that will help your website rank well in the SERPs (search engine result pages) when people are looking for your products.
Um, yeah. But my website is an ecommerce website. How much content can I write that anybody really wants to link to? Descriptions of products? Not so much! Get real!
I hear your cry. So how does an ecommerce get to the top of the SERPs?
Fortunately, there are more ways to get there than there used to be. While links are still the cornerstone of how the Web is put together (search bots still need to hop from one page to another via links), social signals have become increasingly important over the past months.
How do you leverage social signals to rise in the SERPs?
The term “social signals” means Tweets which mention your website, brand or unique product/service names. The best kind of tweets include a link direct to the page inside your website that you’d like people to land on. Similarly, mentions and links on Facebook, LinkedIn, Quora, and tons of others. Here’s a decent list of social networking sites from Wikipedia. Check it for a good place for you to connect with potential buyers of your products/services and branch out from there.
Create A Persona
You’ll want to create a persona or avatar on the platform. That means creating an account and naming it with your own name or the name of your company, if appropriate. If there’s more than one of you in the company that feels comfortable talking about the business, both of you can create accounts using your names. It’s ok to have one account at Facebook that you use for business and another you use for personal stuff. The name difference might be David Smith and Dave Smith, for example. Be transparent about the fact that you’re tweeting, blogging, commenting, and/or making other entries into the social networking site for your company.
Find Followers
Ask folks to follow your professional accounts on your website – and give them a good reason to do so. Don’t just say, “Follow us on Facebook.” So lame! Would YOU follow a corporation? I know, some do, but really… this is about creating a community of people who enjoy engaging with you, your brand, buying and using your products and sharing their joy with others. It’s more than ‘like this page’
One good reason to follow you could include: follow us Twitter to get the “deal of the day”.
Be Creative
Social networking marketing starts with an account on a networking website. But don’t stop at advertising through that account. Create engaging events online or off, that will encourage people to link to a page on your website giving all the details, photos of past events, or articles of interest.
That’s what I meant by creating valuable content, marketing it, and gaining links.
Till Next Time!
-Gillian Muessig/SEOmoz
Guest Contributor