Encouraging web users to share the content of your website should be an increasingly important part of your website SEO. Of course, encouraging sharing is good business practice as it will help promote your business, brand, goods and services. However, social sharing plays an important role in SEO and it looks as if this might become an even larger role as Google battle to outwit practices they consider spam – such as automated links to low quality websites – and that a less reputable SEO company might still carry out.

Here are some great tips on how to encourage sharing of your website content:

1 – Add sharing buttons to every page

Without sharing buttons, websites users won’t be able to share. So as a minimum you need to make sure EVERY page has sharing widgets or buttons. These will include all the leading platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Google+, StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, Pinterest etc. Adding this functionality is easy with modern CMS websites there will be several plug-ins to choose from. Should these buttons be at the top or bottom of the page? As an SEO company our answer has to be: both.

2 – Ask people to share

It’s surprising how many pages don’t do the easiest thing and ask users to share the content. It doesn’t take much to add a line along the lines of ‘like this content, then please share it’. Exactly how you ask will depend on the nature of the organisation, the website and the content – but don’t think you are ‘above’ asking.

3 – Make the content worth sharing

Of course, people will be more inclined to share if the content is worth sharing – and that is largely content or format driven. If the content is compelling, exciting, provocative, funny or groundbreaking then there is a strong chance it will be shared. If the content is on the form of a video, photo gallery or podcast, it is more ‘shareable’ too. If developing such content is troublesome, speak to an SEO company who have experience in content marketing.

4 – Use your social media platforms

An SEO company will tell you that an easy way to share is to do it yourself by sharing those pages on your social media platforms. In fact there are two reasons to do this. Firstly, posting or tweeting the page will help your SEO (provided it is well optimised, of course). Secondly, you can use that post or tweet to further encourage people to share its contents.

5 – That’s what friends are for

If you family, friends and colleagues really wish a business well then they can show their support by sharing, engaging and commenting on pages, social media posts and blogs regularly. They will help build momentum to your social media marketing activity and blogging. Ask them to set time aside to support the business in a practical way. An SEO company will advice on Google’s latest algorithm changes and how they will affect SEO strategy.   Remember to watch this space as we will be releasing a range of online marketing blogs over the coming months. Our readers can also find our Opace Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/OpaceWebDesign. For all the latest goings on, you can keep up-to-date with Opace on Twitter https://twitter.com/OpaceWeb. And we also now have an Opace YouTube page live at http://www.youtube.com/user/opacewebdesign.

Image Credit – SEOPlanter