How Social Networks Use SEO

If you’ve spent any time at all on the internet in the last few years, you’d realize how big of a deal that social media has become. Smart Insights contends that more than half of the world uses social media currently. However, most of these social networks aren’t indexed on search engines the same way that a small entrepreneur or business might be. They can’t just go to a top SEO company and ask them to create an optimization strategy for them. How do you index and crawl millions of social media pages? As a result, social media sites have had to get more competent in how they approach SEO. In this article, we’ll look at how some of the more popular social sites do their optimization.

Facebook

No discussion of social media would be complete without Facebook at the top of the mentions list. Backlinko informs us that 1.73 billion users access Facebook daily. To deal with this massive influx of users, the site knows that it can’t rely on the standard crawling as done by search spiders. Their engineers resolve this issue by subdividing the website into directories. Each of these directories is further partitioned into subdirectories. Spiders can access each of these divisions from the base of the homepage of the social media site. Further categorization by business type and cross categorization in taxonomy make it easier to get on board with Google’s intent-based searching. Facebook is one of the more successful social sites to use this methodology, but they aren’t the only ones.

LinkedIn

While LinkedIn has far less of a population of active users than Facebook, it’s a more tailored site. Jobseekers, in particular, can benefit from SEO-aligned searches that direct them to specific companies. Once again, LinkedIn performs the task of categorizing its users and their affiliated companies into directories that search spiders can access from their homepage. What’s more, they use more categories specific to LinkedIn, such as schools or salaries, to help users with the specifics of their search. LinkedIn’s methodology is to use the search engine as an extension of their own on-site search.

TikTok vs. Instagram

Both TikTok and Instagram have the same target market, but their SEO approach couldn’t be more different. Instagram uses similar directory categorization as Facebook (which makes sense since the same parent company is responsible for both sites). There is a difference in their categorization, however. Instagram focuses on their most famous users and offers a hashtag search since hashtags are essential to finding anything on the site. TikTok’s approach to SEO is that…there’s no approach to SEO. They don’t follow any of Google’s guidelines, and as a result, the search engine can’t index or make any of its data available to searchers.

These social media sites have put a lot of effort into making their content visible on search engines, and for good reason. Search engines are still the best way to get new users onto the platform. Since these users’ data and views are what they’re marketing, it’s best to have more of them rather than less.