How Social Media Networks Affect SEO
We always knew that social media plays a vital role in increasing website traffic and creating awareness for your product or service. But do social signals play a role when it comes to SEO? The answer is yes.
The online visibility of your site depends on social signals. As our world becomes more and more social every day, the importance of social media and its SEO influence also becomes greater.
What Is a Social Signal
This is anything from a tweet mentioning your name or brand or someone that shares a link to your website, to someone ‘liking’ your Facebook page, to receiving a number of +1s on Google+. These are all direct signals. Indirect signals are inbound links from the creation of awareness and the positive reviews your site gets with community engagement.
How Social Signals Work
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A re-tweet or share will send out signals to search engines. These are seen as positive feedback by search engines and will give them a higher value. A high value signal can affect your site’s ranking algorithms and affect your SEO positively. These recommendations give your site credibility in the eyes of search engines. Having said that, links still have the greatest impact on SEO and rankings as indirect social signals work well by increasing inbound links because of brand awareness.
What Sites Work
When social signals come from relevant platforms, they work best for SEO. The most profound effect on search engines are the sites below:
Improve Your Social Signals
How do you get onto the bandwagon of SEO? Try to be on every major social networking site and have a company blog. Integrate your onsite blog with your off site media accounts, linking to content that is engaging to social users and to be able to get them to visit your site. Your social signals are only effective when you regularly update both your social media sites and your blog. If need be, hire a blogger and social media guru to handle these sites for you. When you see more shares, comments and likes, your site does better. This brings in more traffic to your website ultimately.
The Future of Social Signals on SEO
Today, consumers spend more time on social media sites than they do on search engines. In the future, it will be important to have a good social strategy for your site to do well. Social signals could surpass inbound links for good ranking.
With the implementation of Google Authorship, search engines are able to track authors instead of tracking domain. When they are able to associate an author to content, the content will be able to rank higher.
As the world is becoming a more social world, consumers will use this mode of communication to talk about their favorite brand, restaurant or movie in the future.
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