Social media and SEO are like two peas in a pod! Both work together with an aim to develop high-quality content and a visible, strong brand presence.

Having an effective social media presence greatly improves your SEO, reach and search rankings and a large part of your social media strategy should involve SEO.

Here are five tips that will help to boost your SEO through your social media.

Grow your numbers

Your followers and connections will have a significant influence on your search engine optimisation, however Google can detect ‘quality’ followers from bots. Growing your audience can take time, and will not happen overnight, its something that you will need to continue to work on over time sharing useful, quality content, engaging in conversation with your audience and reaching out to potential new followers.

Optimise your content

Your content needs to be useful, shareable and rich, which includes an anchor that includes one of the following; an image, video, an infographic, or link, and your content will need to title it in an accurate, descriptive way so that it can be found. It will also need to include at least one keyword on the subject so that it can be identified. Sharing the anchor a few times alongside various posts can also work well, increasing your chances of your content being ranked.

Social sharing

Google will identify a quality external source which will validate your brand or content which will help improve its ranking. So its important to think about ways to encourage your audience to share your content, and this might be with a competition, call to action or sharing something useful or funny.

Use images alongside 90 per cent of your content

Images play a huge part in boosting your social media and in turn improving your SEO. Content is important, but images should be a big part of your content strategy. They will be the first thing that your audience see, and also pose opportunities to share things such as memes, quotes and infographics.

Use links

Sharing content with links from authoritative sites, such as the BBC or Government sites will rank highly as Google will identify these as valuable and trustworthy sources. This will greatly improve your traffic as your content will be seen as valuable and help improve your search rankings.