Social Media Marketing a Waste of Time: Why Most Social Media Platforms are Not Good for SEO

Social Media Marketing

Many business websites have turned to social media platforms to improve their Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts. Unfortunately, most platforms hurt SEO rather than help it. This article explores why most platforms are not good for SEO, and how you can make the most of social media marketing for your business.

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Before going on, it is important that you understand what SEO is. There is a lot involved in SEO. This is merely to give you a general idea of what it is all about, in a very simple explanation.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of getting your website to rank on search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. When a website ranks, this means it is seen by more people, which is exactly what you want. The more people who see your website, the more visitors you have. And more visitors means, more sales.

SEO has to do with techniques and strategies that help a website rank higher in search engine results pages (Also known as SERPs). Users search for keywords or phrases, and good SEO means, their searches lead to your website.

The most important part of SEO is known as backlinks. This means, other websites have a link somewhere on their site to your site. The more backlinks your website has, the more Google considers you an authority in your field. However, there's a little more to this.

Google likes to see backlinks to your website from other sites that have established themselves as an authority. For example, websites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are three websites that are among the top five websites in the world. Having a backlink from these sites will put you in very good shape, as far as SEO is concerned. Right?

Unfortunately, this is not the case.

Different Ways of Ranking Websites

Social media platforms and search engines like Google operate differently. While search engines use complex algorithms to rank websites based on keywords, backlinks, and user experience, social media platforms use their own algorithms to determine what content to show to users. This means that the criteria for ranking on search engines and social media platforms are very different, making it difficult for social media to directly impact SEO.

NoFollow Links

The links shared on most social media platforms are often nofollow links. This means that search engines do not consider these links when ranking a website.

According to Google, it's as if they don't exist.

Additionally, social media platforms often use shortened URLs, which do not carry the same weight as regular URLs when it comes to SEO. This makes it harder for search engines to crawl and index the content shared on social media, and this hurts SEO.

Why do they do this? I've been asking myself this question for years!

Limited Control Over Content and Links

This means that even if a post on social media gets noticed by a lot of users, it may not necessarily translate into higher rankings on search engines.

In contrast, backlinks from reputable and authoritative websites are considered a crucial factor in search engine rankings. While social media could help drive traffic to your website, their links aren't considered backlinks since they're no-follow links. This will not help your SEO efforts in the long run.

Moreover, social media platforms are highly saturated with content and competition. With millions of businesses and individuals trying to get more attention, it can be very difficult to stand out and get noticed. This can make it difficult to drive organic traffic to your website through social media, especially for the little guy with limited resources and a smaller following.

It doesn't have to be this way, but unfortunately, it is.

Is There Still Hope for your Social Media Marketing?

While most platforms may not have a direct impact on SEO, they can still be valuable for businesses in terms of brand awareness, engagement, and driving traffic to their website. But it's a slow process that will take years, and many people don't have years to wait.

Conclusion

While social media platforms may not be good for SEO in the traditional sense, they can still be valuable to businesses in terms of brand building and driving occasional traffic to their website. However, buisinesses don't want occasional traffic. They want massive traffic. And in our next article, we will show you that there is still hope for your Social Media Marketing and SEO efforts.

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