Boost Your Homepage SEO With This Social Media Share Button Tweak
We have discussed in the past how lots of social media sharing and retweets can boost your websites SEO.
Google has admitted they look at social media websites to use social signals as part of their search algorithms. Facebook is a closed system and Google has said many times they can’t access the site properly, whilst Twitter being an open system (most updates are public) makes it somewhat easier for Google to try and index, despite their data sharing deal with Twitter expiring sometime ago.
Which Social Media site will give you the biggest SEO boost?
Out of all the social media websites, at the moment Twitter has the potential to impact your websites SEO the most. After Twitter it would be Google Plus then Facebook and LinkedIn – but to a much lesser extent.
How do you do it?
For this post I will show you a tweak you can make to your Twitter share buttons (and of course you could apply this tweak to your Google+ and LinkedIn share buttons too if you so wish).
Normally you would tweet your blog or article and it would look something like this:
Treat your LinkedIn Connections Like your Twitter Followers socialmedianews.com.au/treat-your-lin… via @smn_australia
— David Cowling (@SMN_Australia) October 5, 2012
This tweet shows: Title of Article – Link of Article – via your username. This is good and every tweet boosts the profile and social signal for this page. Now we can take this one step further and edit the Tweet button code.
What you do is add your homepage URL as a prefix to all tweets – so when someone tweets your content it looks something like this:
socialmedianews.com.au | Treat your LinkedIn Connections Like your Twitter Followers socialmedianews.com.au/treat-your-lin… via @smn_australia
— David Cowling (@SMN_Australia) October 11, 2012
You can see this tweet is now displayed as: Your hompage URL
| Title of Article – URL of Article – via your username
This will mean every time someone tweets your content you will be getting 2 links, one back to the article/ blog post and another to your homepage. Overtime this number will build up substantially and can give you an SEO boost over your competitors.
It’s rather simple, I will share the Tweet button code I’ve used:
<a href=”https://twitter.com/share” class=”twitter-share-button” data-text=”socialmedianews.com.au | <?php echo get_the_title(); ?>” data-url=”<?php echo get_permalink(); ?>” data-via=”smn_australia”>Tweet</a>
<script>!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=”//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js”;fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,”script”,”twitter-wjs”);</script>
You can see the start of the tweet button leads with data-text =
I have added socialmedianews.com.au to the start of the tweet then a pipe symbol | Then there is the php WordPress function to get the title of the article, then the php WordPress function to get the URL/Permalink of the article.
Over time this has the potential to build up a large number of tweets and links directing to the homepage of your website. Don’t underestimate the boost this can give your website.
Any other benefits?
This is a unique way to display your tweets – it looks different and stands out from all the other ‘standard’ looking tweets. This could increase the CTR.
Also you may find that some people are not interested in that particular piece of content, but because they are viewing your tweet and can see the homepage link, may click that instead to look at other articles. It all comes down to improving usability of your site and providing alternative options to your visitor.
