How to Use Social Media Buttons for SEO?

Also, I will teach you how to add them to your web pages along with other best practices when it comes to displaying share buttons on your content.

Table of Contents:

• What are Social Buttons?
• Why is Social Media Important for SEO?
• How Does Social Media Affect SEO?
• How Do I Add Social Media Buttons To My Website?
• Best Practices of Placing Share Icons On Your Website
• Key Takeaways

Let’s get started.

What are Social Buttons?

Social media buttons or social buttons are clickable icons displayed on some of your web pages to allow your website visitors to share your content with their personal social networking profiles, such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms. Also, share icons can include sending pieces of content to an email address.

Social media icons for sharing can provide more convenience to your readers or customers, especially when they want to let people know about the recent read that they find profound and useful or about their recent purchase that they just want to show to their friends on social media. Therefore, social icons for sharing can improve your site’s user experience.

Plus, the sharing behavior of your website visitors will help you raise more awareness about your brand as well as the high-quality and ultra-relevant content you have on your site.

Also, the social media icon set for sharing looks like this:

Or insert live social media share buttons here 🙂

Why is Social Media Important for SEO?

Social media marketing and search engine optimization often go hand in hand in digital marketing. More often than not, one equally proves essential as it is to the other. And here are the top three reasons why social media is important for SEO:

Social signals indicate the content quality

Social signals are the likes, comments, shares, and overall social media visibility of your web page as perceived by the search engines, such as Google and Bing. And these signals are increasingly becoming vital in search engine algorithms because they contribute to your page’s organic search ranking, especially in the form of backlinks.

So, the more links pointing to your web page or the more social signals it gets, particularly social shares, the more the search engines learn that your page is worth ranking. Most importantly, the more your target audience will know that you have a top-notch content that’s worth reading and sharing.

Social media helps you reach a wider audience

Did you know that there are around 3.81 billion social media users worldwide and that consumers spend an average of 3 hours per day on social media? This means that leveraging social media platforms can help you double or triple your target market and expand your reach in this extremely crowded and highly competitive digital space called the Internet.

Therefore, using social media buttons on your web pages can help you increase your influence outside of your existing network of website visitors as they help you attract more audiences and create new opportunities for your business by sharing your content with their social media pages.

Having social media buttons on your site makes your content user-friendly, increasing its chance to be read more

The best benefit of having a social media buttons pack for sharing your web page content is the fact that your site visitors won’t have to leave your page just to post your content on their walls.

Remember that website users have short attention spans. So, keeping them engaged on your site is critical – ensure that you don’t give them too many steps when enticing them to like, share, and comment on your content. So, make sure that your web page is user-friendly as much as possible by having social media buttons easily accessible on the page.

How Does Social Media Buttons Affect SEO?

Google has already declared that social media is not a direct ranking factor. But as I already mentioned, social signals can indirectly affect your SEO efforts. In other words, social media may not be an official ranking factor for Google, but it can help boost the ranking factors that Google definitely considers – take social sharing as an example:

Now, all of this social sharing can boost your content visibility and help you acquire high-quality backlinks across several social media platforms, especially if your content lands on the right people who will most likely visit your website and link to your content from their own site – this is how social media can affect your SEO.

How Do I Add Social Media Buttons to My Website?

Adding social share buttons on your website may differ depending on the kind of content management system (CMS) you’re using. Generally, you add these share icons using Hypertext Markup Language also known as HTML codes.

But popular CMS now has plugins that will let you utilize share buttons on your web pages easily. So, here are four different ways to add social media icons for sharing on your site:

Adding social media buttons on your WordPress site

WordPress site owners can easily install a social media plugin. Follow these steps:

1. Access your WordPress website backend.

2. On the left side menu options, hover on “Plugins” and click “Add New.”

3. Go to the search bar on the right-hand corner of the plugin options and type the plugin name of the social media logos or buttons for sharing that you want. We recommend the simple social icons or sassy social icons.

Then, click install. That’s it!

Adding social media share icons on your WIX site

WIX site owners can also find it easy peasy to add social icons for sharing on their websites. Follow these steps:

1. Access your single post page.

2. Hover on the space in your single post page, click the three dots for options and click “Settings.”

3. Scroll down to the social buttons options

4. Check on uncheck the boxes next to the social media buttons to display or hide them from your web page.

That’s it! You can also click on the social icon fields to change the text, and drag the slider to increase or decrease the size of your social buttons.

Adding social share buttons on your Shopify store

If you have an online shop with Shopify, you can choose two options when adding social media icons set for sharing on your store:

1. See the social media section of the app store.
2. Check out the theme store because some of the themes come with the social media share icons already enabled.

To check if your existing theme has social share buttons enabled, go to “customize theme page” and check the homepage, sidebar, header, and footer menu.

Adding social media icons for sharing on a site that you’ve built from scratch

Now, if you run a website that is not WordPress, Wix, or Shopify, you can copy and paste an HTML code to activate your share buttons for social media. You can look for a good and user-friendly website to copy the code.

Or you can use third-party adding services that combine the codes for social media icons, so you will only have one place for all of your social buttons optimization. I recommend the following services:

• AddInto
• AddToAny
• AddThis

Now, if you are still having such a difficult time adding social media buttons to allow content sharing from your site, don’t hesitate to consult the social media SEO experts to get this time-consuming task off your hand.

Best Practices of Placing Share Icons on Your Website

These best practices or placing share icons on your website will help you improve natural linking to your web pages from social media platforms.

Here are the five actionable steps of the best practices that you can emulate:

Place social media buttons at the bottom of the content page

You see, there are arguably two main reasons if your readers reach the bottom of your content page.

1. They want to get right down to the point and read your content summary or conclusion.
2. They liked your content really well and have read a substantial amount of it if not the whole page.

Either way, these are good reasons to place your social share buttons at the bottom of your page to remind your readers to share your content with their social networking profiles.

Once you have accumulated substantial social shares, display your social media icons for sharing and the number of shares accumulated at the top of the content page as well.

As you begin to acquire more social shares, it is also best to place your share buttons at the top of your content page – this technique will help you show your readers, especially new ones (those that have little to no awareness of your brand) that people have shared your content. Therefore, it is worth their time – they will read it and most likely share it with their social media pages.

It looks like this:

Make sure to place social share buttons on web pages that need to be shared

It’s surprising how heaps of company websites miss a lot of opportunities by not placing social media share icons on highly shareable web pages. Here are the types of pages that people are more inclined to share than other pages in your site:

●      Blog Posts

●      Case Studies

●      Research Findings

●      Job Posts

Ensure to display share buttons to popular social media platforms

Consider the most popular social media platforms that your target market uses. Prioritize them when it comes to displaying social share buttons on your website.

Here are the leading social media platforms in 2020 according to Statista.com:

So, if we are to rank social media sharing platforms that are used worldwide based on the data, this is the ranking order:

1. Facebook
2. YouTube
3. WhatsApp
4. Facebook Messenger
5. WeChat
6. Instagram
7. TikTok
8. QQ
9. QZone
10. Sina Weibo
11. Reddit
12. Kuaishou
13. Snapchat
14. Twitter
15. Pinterest

However, it does not mean that you have to get all social media icons on the list. Make sure that you know where your target market hangs out online, so you can avoid including unnecessary social media buttons.

Key Takeaways

• Using social media buttons on your website may appear to be futile but they are essential in assisting your SEO efforts, especially when it comes to gaining more content visibility for your site and more high-quality backlinks.
• Social share buttons improve your site’s user experience and help you expand your content reach and brand influence. Plus, social signals indicate content quality.
• Best practices of adding share icons include placing social media icons for sharing at the bottom of your content page as well as displaying these share buttons at the top of your content page, especially when they start to accumulate actual shares, ensuring to place the share buttons on highly shareable web pages, such as in blog posts, case studies, research findings, and job posts. Plus, making sure that you include the popular social media platforms used by your target market.
• Adding social media sharing buttons are quite easy, especially in popular CMS, such as WordPress, Wix, and Shopify. But if you are having trouble with adding social buttons on your site or you simply don’t know which social media platforms to consider, don’t hesitate to talk to the social media and SEO experts.

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