For those who are concerned with optimizing social media, part of what you’re wanting to do is keep up with Google, and their analytics. Google is the big fish in the sea, when it comes to search engines. If you’re not satisfying Google’s requirements, and staying at the top of their pages, then you’re not going to be getting those crucial visitors to your website. The question then becomes, how to optimize social media for SEO?

The first thing to keep in mind is that the majority of companies say that social media is integrated into their SEO strategy. That many businesses can’t be wrong…you can’t ignore social media, as part of an optimization campaign. This means that links to your website that come about through social media accounts are important, when it comes to your rankings. It is generally understood that links to your content on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, and other social media sites help the search engines prioritize your website in search rankings. This is because Google crawls (reads) social media sites for data.

What is to be taken from this? Simply put, the need for a strong presence by your company on social media sites cannot be overemphasized, because Google is going to be looking for that. If you’re not using those platforms, your search rank is going to suffer. Besides that, social media can seem more personal than a webpage, in some cases. When your company’s name is put into a search engine, if the top three hits, for instance, are your company’s website, and then its Twitter and Facebook accounts, it’s just as likely someone will look to one of the social media accounts to get a feeling for your company as they would your actual website.

This means that if you weren’t making your social media accounts a priority before, it’s time to get on that. Dedicate as much time to your accounts on Facebook, Twitter, etc, as you have been your company website. If you don’t, regardless of the particulars of your business, it’s more than likely your sales are going to suffer.