What is the best Practice for Adding Social Buttons to your Sites from SEO Perspective?

[ShivaS]

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.

[Mark_Jay_Apsey_Jr.]

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.

[EugeneF]

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.

[ShivaS]

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.

[ShivaS]

Thanks Eugene for your great advise. Would you add the social buttons to your Thank You Pages?

[w0lfiesmithUK]

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.

[ShivaS]

Thanks James! Great tutorial. I'm going to test this box on one of our sites.