Strengthening the link between social media and SEO

There are various Webmaster Tools platforms to help you manage your SEO campaigns, but knowing how your social media activities interact with your main website can be difficult.

Now, however, Bing has introduced Connected Pages, a way to associate social media accounts on third-party networks with your Bing Webmaster Tools account for your self-hosted websites.

Social media platforms including Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Google+ and Twitter are all compatible with Connected Pages, as well as social media platforms YouTube, Instagram and Pinterest.

You can also associate pages on several online stores, such as Google Play, the Apple Store, and the Windows and Windows Phone Stores.

To do so, all you need is to link from your social network profile back to your main website, and then add the social networking account to your Bing Webmaster Tools dashboard.

Significantly, Connected Pages do not require access to your social networking account itself – meaning they do not provide Microsoft with your password or any private information.

Duane Forrester, senior product manager at Bing, writes in a Bing Webmaster Blog post that data will begin to populate within 72 hours, and can be filtered using custom time ranges in the same way that normal site data can be.