Like, Share and Comment, to Increase Profit

If you've been involved in search engine marketing (SEM), especially optimization for natural listings, then you will no doubt have heard about implementing social media for improved performance.

The latest trends show that Google Plus profiles are especially advantageous for website growth; however, that’s only one part of the process.

There are four areas to focus on that help you push your marketing campaigns to the next level:

1. Facebook
2. Twitter
3. Google Plus
4. Blog Comments

When you put more effort into the aforementioned areas, you will have an active social media presence. The first three assists you tremendously if, in addition to search engine rankings, you want to grow a social following. Blog comments will signal to search providers that your blog is active, therefor raising your search engine rank.

The number of Facebook likes and tweets your pages get can be used to gauge how effective your campaign is. From the social interaction you receive, search engines can tell how great your content is.

The best part is that when you have Google Plus, you can also use the rel="author" tag to verify that the content is the property of yourself which helps you put a real name to your content. When Google has this information available, what happens is that when people in your social circles run a Google search, they are able to see your author bio picture in the search results. It’s a great way to increase your CTR from natural search listings.

The other thing you’ll find happening is that you’ll begin to climb the rankings ladder through social sharing. Viral marketing is made a lot easier when you have a group of people sharing your content with their friends online. They can then re-share that content with their friends who may be interested in the same thing you’re blogging about or the same service your website is focusing on.

Blogging and not getting any feedback can be quite frustrating, basically feeling that you are creating content for people but you are the only one reading it. You can speed up the process by hiring a few people to leave comments and share your content, which will improve your social media presence and give you that push you need until more people start sharing your pages.

A great place to kick off your campaign is to use freelance websites. Fiverr is one service that a lot of niche marketers swear by for small SEO services that deliver improved search performance.

You can hire people for £5, and they’ll then go to your website and give you some comments on the posts you have. You can also hire people to tweet and give you Facebook likes as well as some +1s for your marketing campaigns.

The above method is really cost effective, but you need to be careful how you go about selecting the services. You don’t want to have hundreds of comments or likes all from the one source. Natural growth is something you need to take care with as search engines could see that activity as an attempt to manipulate search results which can lead to having your site de-indexed for malicious practices.

Before buying a blog commenting service, make sure that the person you are hiring is using proxies to diversify their IP address and location. That way you can have 1 person comment on your posts simulating different people from different countries.

It’s important to check the feedback that others left for the provider of that service. You don’t want to bring someone in who is going to leave great read on all your posts.

You need descriptive comments that are closely related to the topic of your post. That way, the comments on you blog are what is called user generated content. When you have a really active blog, you can find that while your original post may be around the 400 word range, the comments left by your readers and hires would multiply that tenfold, increasing the search worth of your page.

That’s the sort of content that is going to really push your blog to the next level and using paid services is how you make your site look really active, which has the bonus of bringing in natural comments from new visitors.

You can think of this as part of your business overheads, although it is really cheap and isn’t going to damage your marketing budget by too much. Besides, those hired comments aren’t going to be the sole driver of your blog for long as when your new visitors turn up and see people have already been commenting and you’ve been replying to their feedback, they are going to feel more comfortable about getting involved in the conversation.

As for the other social shares, the best thing to do is to add a sentence at the end of your post that asks people to share it. You’ll be surprised how effective it is to just ask people outright by saying things like: If you enjoyed this post press the like button...  or,  Let others know through any of the options below”. Under your post you would have your options for liking via Facebook, Twitter, Google +1s and links to share via social bookmarking websites as well.

If you follow these simple steps, your social value will increase bringing you more visitors and in turn increasing your search engine rankings.