Social media activities of a company improve the ranking of its business website on search engine result pages. Companies spend thousands of dollars to create Facebook fan pages, Twitter, Google+ profiles to interact with their customers and provide Google another place to find their name. Pinterest is one of the youngest and highly popular social media network, but only a few people know how it can be used for search engine optimization purpose.

Here are a few things you can do to make Pinterest your partner for SEO.

1.    When you try to open an account, it gives you an opportunity to connect the profile with Facebook and Twitter. You should link Pinterest to Facebook and Twitter to get the maximum benefit. Once connected, all your pins will appear on Facebook timeline and you will be able to promote them in Twitter as well.

2.    Add a “Pin It” button to your website to allow users share your content easily. There is no need to install any plug-in to get this feature. Just login and go to About>Pin It button and you will find the “Pin It Button for Websites” code. Copy paste the code in your site and the button will appear.

3.    Whenever you share an image, add a link back to your website. This strategy will help you attract quality traffic from Pinterest to your website.

4.    It gives you an opportunity to write a 500 character description for images. Write a keyword rich brief description for every single image you share to help Google find your profile faster.

5.    While creating boards, choose keyword rich and topic specific names. For instance, “Places to visit in Cairo” is better than “Egypt Images”.

After joining Pinterest, start following some people and companies. Share interesting and genuine images to increase your followers. Make sure that both users and search engines love your corporate profile.

Pinterest recently achieved the 50th spot in “50 most visited websites” list and now this photo sharing social media site wants to earn higher spots by offering some user friendly features. A few days ago, they added the “secret board” feature to help users share content without worrying about prying eyes.

The site was launched a couple of years ago and successfully attracted viewers from all age group. Despite offering the same photo sharing service like Flicker and Picasa, people loved it due to its refreshingly new user interface. The user interface and pinning feature made such an impact on web designers that now some of the most renowned sites like EBay and MySpace are replicating the same UI design.

Pinterest users always complained that whenever they share some images, anyone can view it. There are no strong privacy settings like Facebook or other social media sites. Pinterest developers finally realized the problem and introduced the “secret boards”.

When you upload some images in a secret board, they remain visible only to you, unless you share them with someone. To activate this facility from web version, go to your profile, scroll down, and at the bottom of the page you will find “create a secret board” option. You can also do the same thing by clicking on the “add” button at the top right corner. Just make sure that you turn the “secret” button “on”.

To activate it from mobile app, visit your profile page, touch the “boards” tab and find the “create a secret board” option.

LinkedIn recently added the “follow” feature to increase user engagement and give the site a better social image. They have added 150 highly influential people in their network so that users can follow them. The elite group includes people like Mashable‘s CEO Pete Cashmore, USA President Barack Obama, Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, Virgin founder/CEO Richard Branson, physician/writer Deepak Chopra, motivational speaker Tony Robbins and many more.

The feature is similar to Twitter as you can follow anyone and receive their updates regularly. However, unlike Twitter there is no character limit and more importantly, all the updates are business related. LinkedIn editor Dan Roth said that they don’t want to spoil the brand image and their main focus “is to always make sure that there’s high quality”.

Their plan makes sense because LinkedIn users look for relevant business related news, not frequent updates. Twitter may have achieved success by providing an open forum to common users, but this professional social media giant does not want to add anyone unimportant in their “follow” network. Roth is so serious about the quality of their influential circle that he said the next member inclusion date is not fixed yet.

The social media network will judge the group’s popularity on the basis of likes, views, shares and comments. They will use the data for self regulation and to identify the top 10 most influential people.

LinkedIn was never as popular as Facebook or Twitter, but this new feature may increase interaction between users and help the company earn more ad revenue.

In an era when web content writing is considered a significant web activity, ‘Semantic Search’ (SS) has created a stir among internet communities with speculations relating to its impact.

Attaining momentum in SERP, which is the core objective of web content, involves attempts to use the right keywords and phrases that would help sites rank. So far, Google has given results based solely on data typed in the search tab. However, Semantic Search, introduced on March, 2012, is a more thoughtful and meaningful attempt to make SEO processes more advanced, and take it beyond content and targeted keywords.

SS aims to improve search accuracy through considering various points including search: location, intent, variation of words, special queries, synonyms, concept matching, and natural language queries while providing results. Using artificial intelligence to understand the visitor query, it seeks to discern the meaning of the contextual terms in a database to generate more appropriate results. For instance, Google will comprehend two different meanings on writing “their” and “there”. It will differentiate the meaning of words like “New” and “New York” while trying to interpret the relation between words.

How is it related to Knowledge Graph?

Google’s Knowledge Graph acts as a support system for SS. It will respond to queries of users by providing them exact information. It will help Google provide more appropriate answers to users by providing links to contextual information in addition to sites discussing the required data.

With Knowledge Graph, Google will no longer be just a search engine. It will also try answering for requested information instead of simply relying on websites for information. This essentially means that any website will not only be competing with competitor websites, but Google itself.

Impact of Semantic Search on SEO

Keywords are an integral part of SEO. Content writing with appropriate keywords helps your articles rank better in SERP. To rank higher in SS, it is essential to use appropriate keywords in the right places in addition to ensuring the structure and quality of content. Keyword research also focuses on what the user actually means while looking up keywords. So, one has to keep in mind that an article consists well-researched keywords.