What is the best Practice for Adding Social Buttons to your Sites from SEO Perspective?
-
Hey Guys,
As you all know there are many social buttons out there that can be added to your website. Facebook Like button, Twitter's Tweet and Follow buttons, Google +1, and AddThis buttons are just a few to mention.
All of these buttons can be customized, eg. you may choose to point your FB Like button to your homepage, to a specific inner page, or to your Facebook Brand Page. Same with your +1 button. Moreover, you may choose to add Twitter and Google+ Follow buttons to your site's pages, and so on.
My questions are very simple:
Is there any best practice for adding social buttons to your site from SEO perspective? if yes,
Which social buttons to add?
Where is the ideal place for them on your page?
Where these buttons should be pointing to? your homepage? specific inner page? or to your official brand pages?
Thanks in Advance,
Yogev.
-
Thanks James! Great tutorial. I'm going to test this box on one of our sites.
-
Though I'm not aware of any technical impact from where or how you choose to place social buttons, I've found the greatest share rates to be when you prompt the user with a call-to-action at the end of a piece of content. The best way to do this is with a box that slides in somewhere non-intrusively at the end of the article (if that's the content we're referring to here). There's a great tutorial for this here.
-
Thanks Eugene for your great advise. Would you add the social buttons to your Thank You Pages?
-
Thank you very much for your detailed answer. It's very helpful.
I agree, there is no substitute for high quality content, and you always have to fit your social activity to your target audience.
However, when all things being equal - assuming you already have a great content and your content fits your customers - you still have to choose which social buttons will generate you the most SEO value. If Google +1s have more SEO value than FB likes, you may decide to place the +1 button first, make it bigger, etc.
Do you know by any chance if there is such hierarchy between the social buttons from SEO perspective? Are FB shares more valuable than FB likes, or perhaps tweets and +1s are the most valuable ones? Which social buttons are most likely to increase your ranking on Google and other SEs?
Cheers,
Y.
-
Present the buttons to your visitor at the point in time your visitor is most likely to want to follow you. (We called this the "point of maximum like")
For most ecommerce sites, this is not before they make the purchase. Don't distract them with social stuff when your focus should be on converting them to a purchase. Give them an option at the end of the checkout or in a follow up email. We increased social shares and follows doing this by such a large percentage that made our previous efforts (share buttons on all pages) seem insignificant.
-
Adding them to your page with no applicable content on the social networks provides no value. Like a ferrari without gas.
Before you work through the exercise ask yourself, are your customers or clients going to really utilize them on your site. Are they going to click on them? I see so many companies that put them in a high profile position and they get no activity. WASTE OF VALUABLE SPACE. If they aren' being used on your site but they do create alot of online activity from the social network,s get them connected to the home page in a lower profile position (footer) so you get the link juice value but you don't take up valuable space....
Doesn't matter where the buttons are on your page for SEO.
Add whatever social buttons you have that have activity and fit your customers, clients or vendors profiles....on the business to business side, our linked in activity has been very valuable. On our consumer side, facebook and twitter have been very valuable.
Home page pointing always makes the most sense for general seo. But if you have a special offer or something specific that you are trying to generate value or action, then move them to a specific URL landing page to optimize that value or action.
Hope this helps....cheers.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Will Traffic From Social Media Effects Search Engine Ranking
hi, If i get paid traffic from social media on my website blog. Will overall ranking of my website increase in search engine or not. Share your experience.
Social Media | | Khan500 -
How to use Social backlinks in SEO.
Do you integrate Social backlinks into your SEO? If so please describe how you use Social backlinks in your SEO.
Social Media | | Green.landon0 -
Site relaunch, should I be worried?
Hi Everyone, Hope your all doing well. Im about 1 week away from relaunching my website and im a little worried it might hurt my rankings. Basically im trying to make the website better, so its undergone a massive overhaul such as being made responsive on tablet + mobile, completely redesigned colours etc so now a flat design bringing less images in the hope to increase load times, navigation is more of a silo structure to try and make everything that bit more relevant and to cut down on clutter for users. I haven't touched the urls so they will stay the same but I have stripped and added new content because as the years have passed, reflecting back some of it is basic and not professional enough - so ive had it reproduced by a copywriter. I've also gone through the social channels and stripped out some content from there (almost reset them) because the style of the content and design no longer aligns with the new design and voice of the new site. Without a doubt the site is much better (been in dev for 2 months) im just worried Google might not like something? It's a shame really because I should be excited but all im worried about is Google spanking it.
Social Media | | followuk0 -
Analytics tagging on social media links
Curious: do you all tag your social media links with Google Analytics parameters? I know Google Analytics automatically tags referrals from social channels, but I am interested in possibly adding additional tracking parameters to links that I share and potentially promote. If I tag my social links with GA tracking codes, and they are shared widely, do I lose any potential SEO value from those links? I know Google isn't necessarily factoring in social shares from Facebook, etc. yet, but it would seem that, since tagged links are ones that we've influenced, any shares of that link would potentially be considered unnatural? Just curious what others' best practices are for social sharing. Thanks, in advance.
Social Media | | kylie_rw1 -
Facebook description - How it affects SEO
Hello MOZ community, Today my SEO team and I talked about the activities we do in the social media. And one of the things that we discussed is the post description/caption. We upload a lot of unique, fresh and high quality content to our website on daily base, so we want our customers to reach these articles by sharing it on our social media channels. My question is: what is the best way to share a post in Social Media Channels and specially on Facebook ? what description should we use ? is it better to use the article's title? or new text with CTA (call to action) and ask the users to click on the link to read the article in our website ? Another question: how can we use the keyword targeting in the Social Media ? Thanks 🙂
Social Media | | JonsonSwartz0 -
What's a good social media content creation brief template?
I'm trying to put together a brief template for our copywriters to use when requesting the creation of a piece of content. These are the points I have thought of so far are: Subject / Topic Content Objective Desired User Outcome / Call to action Sources, References Tone of voice Related product information Target SEO keywords Can you think of anything else to add? Do you know good resources (articles, blog post) tackling the subject of a content creation brief? Thanks in advance.
Social Media | | Amiee0 -
Top 20 social bookmarking sites
2011, what are the best social bookmarking sites to use for getting backlinks and what are your strategies?
Social Media | | echo10 -
Linking to a twitter account? Best to use the /#!/ or not? or no difference?
So if I am linking to someone's twitter account should I use the ajax code #! or not? http://twitter.com**/#!/**thos003 vs http://twitter.com/thos003 Bonus Question: I have also seen in the past that google splits a domain that has as a secure protocol. https://twitter.com vs http://twitter.com Does does that split link juice?
Social Media | | Thos0030