You have a great business website, and a strong social media presence. Sure, you have links back to your website on your Facebook, Twitter and Google+ accounts, but should you also link from your website to your social channels? Absolutely! Linking to your social profiles from your website is a simple, yet highly effective piece of your overall digital marketing strategy.

Here are three key reasons for why you should link to your social networks from your website, and best practices when adding them:

1. Link building:

As search engines get smarter, it is increasingly difficult to stay on top of all the ways to make sure people can find your business online when they search. It makes sense that you want to get quality links pointing back to your website, but why would you link away from it? The simple answer is that you also need to build search relevance for your business on the different social media channels. Building quality links for your social networks helps those display more prominently in search results, which assists your overall business presence online.

2. Improving your ranking in search results:

Although it may sound backwards, adding links to your social channels from your website actually helps increase the chance that users will find your website when they search on Google, Bing, Yahoo! and other engines. Google states this directly in their support section of why and how to connect to Google+: “Linking your Google+ Page and your website is useful because…it provides Google with information that we can use to help determine the relevancy of your site to a user query on Google Search.”

3. Being visible:

Just having the links on your site isn’t good enough – you want to make sure that it is easy for users to find them, so they can interact with you wherever your business lives on the web. At Milestone, we follow three key guidelines when adding links to social icons:

• The social links/buttons should be at the top, bottom or side of your home page;
• Links or buttons that stay with the user as they navigate through the site or from page to page are optimal;
• To make sure users don’t leave your website completely, make sure the links open the social media channels in a new tab or window.

So there you have it! While being active on social media channels can help you build or retain a solid audience, you want to do everything you can to make sure that both the search engines and your target consumer market can find you with the greatest of ease. Making connections across the web between content that you control is a great way to maximize your presence and ensure you can get the largest number of eyes on your products and services.

Author: Mike Supple, Director of Social Media
Referenced Site: https://blog.milestoneinternet.com/getting-social/3-key-reasons-to-add-social-media-links-to-your-website/