Service Providers

Use social media to improve your website’s ranking

Having a dealership presence on social media sites provides many benefits, including the opportunity to improve search engine optimization (SEO) ranking. There are distinct SEO benefits achieved from maintaining social media sites, which include quality inbound links to your website and opportunities for additional search engine listings.

Search engines determine a website’s ranking based on criteria, which include the site’s title, Meta description, quality content and link popularity. Link popularity is determined by the quality and relevance of the inbound links to your website. Links from your social sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are highly relevant to your website and can easily be added to each of your social pages. On YouTube, in addition to adding your URL to your channel profile, include it at the beginning of each video description.

In addition to benefiting your SEO ranking, inbound links from your social pages also increase traffic back to your website. Take a look at the referral links on your website analytics to determine what percent of your traffic is arriving to your site from your social media pages.

Major search engines such as Google and Bing also crawl and index social media sites. It is very likely for your dealership to not only have search engine listings for your dealership’s website but also for your social media sites. Just as with your website, attention to your title, Meta description and content is just as important for the search engine ranking success of your social media sites.  Review the title, Meta descriptions and content on each of your social media sites. These areas are key to the successful ranking of your social media pages. Here is a sample of what fields are considered Meta data by the search engines:

  • Facebook – The title is your Facebook page name, the Meta description is pulled from the content in your “about” section. When posting to your wall, include keywords in your posts that will also improve your SEO ranking.
  • Twitter – On Twitter, as you may have already guessed, the title is your username. Twitter will also use your name listed in your profile settings, as the alt tag for your profile image. Include keywords in your Twitter bio for additional SEO benefits.
  • YouTube – The username of your YouTube channel also serves as the SEO title. The description of your YouTube channel is your Meta description. Each video is optimized as well. The video title serves as your SEO title and the video description is picked up as the Meta description. The video tags are also used by the search engines.

As you become more comfortable with managing your social media presence, examine your sites from an SEO perspective to improve your search engine placement and ultimately increase traffic to your website.

Dave Valentine is the National Sales Manager of PowerSports Network, a leading provider of web site solutions serving more than 2,500 dealers in North America. PSN is part of Dominion Enterprises, a leading marketing services company serving multiple industries including real estate, apartments, specialty vehicles, marine, automotive and travel.
Contact: dvalentine@powersportsnetwork.com
Website: www.PowerSportsNetwork.com

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