By Bob Speyer and Justin Delos Reyes – Web Success Team

The art of Social Media SEO (or Social SEO) lies in your ability to speak without disturbing the conversation. This means keeping your followers engaged while you implement keywords and keyword phrases into your profiles. Search engines love social media and brands that leverage it correctly. Building a Social SEO strategy for your profiles is imperative to your overall web success.

Find the Right Keywords
The text people enter in a Google, Bing, or Yahoo search field is called a keyword or keyword phrase. Before you create a social media profile you need to do some research about popular keywords that are related to your brand or service. If your website is properly SEOed, you will already have a list of keywords that you can refer to. If not, try using the Google AdWords Keyword tool.

The Google AdWords Keyword tool will help you discover keywords and keyword phrases that people are searching for on Google. This tool is used primarily for websites but it will help you optimize your social media pages.

When you enter a word or phrase into the Google AdWords Keyword tool, an extensive list of keywords and phrases will appear. Choose 15 to 30 keyword phrases that can be easily used in a sentence and have more than 5,000 monthly searches. Phrases with less than 5,000 monthly searches probably won’t help your profiles (unless your niche is very limited and specific). You can definitely experiment with them as your social media presence grows over time though.

Enrich Your Twitter Profile
Now that you have selected your keyword phrases, it’s time to implement them into your profiles and pages. The bio section of your Twitter profile serves as the meta description for search engines. Since you can only write 160 characters in your bio, you should include the best phrases that reflect your brand’s website and the content you will post. Your tweets should typically incode brand related keywords within the first 40 characters. The first 40 characters of your tweets serve as the title tag in Google search results. Keep this in mind especially when you decide to send promotional tweets to your followers.

Maximize Your Facebook Potential
Maximize your Facebook Page’s SEO opportunities by implementing keywords into your status updates and by weaving keywords into your photo descriptions. Keywords in photo descriptions don’t hold as much weight in Google as they do in Facebook searches, but you don’t want to miss opportunities that might improve your rankings. The notes application is one area of Facebook that allows you to write links with anchor text. Anchor text should include relevant keywords or keyword phrases that build quality inbound links to your website.

Take Advantage of LinkedIn’s Value
LinkedIn holds great authority in search engines. Employee profiles that link to company websites can improve the PageRank for those sites. Instead of using the default “website” label that is available when you list a website on your profile, select “other” and enter a relevant keyword phrase. Again, you should utilize anchor text whenever you can. It’s important for your entire profile to be filled out but pay special attention to the Summary, Specialities, and Experience sections. These fields give you a golden opportunity to seamlessly include keywords and keyword phrases into your profile.

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