With all this talk about having a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy for your business’ online presence, a very important part is knowing the components of SEO. Google uses over 200 factors to rank a site and search engine algorithms are continually updating and changing, so keeping up with the best SEO practices takes effort! A recent development in the search engine world has been its connection with social media. Until a couple years ago, social media wasn’t as popular and as widely used as it is now, much less used by search engines to gauge the relevance of a topic or search item. But now, as social media has grown, so has its influence on your online rankings!
Off page links used to be the top ranking factor for search engines; that is how many sites were linking back to yours. Obviously the more sites that have links back to your page, the more useful and relevant your website is and thus should be ranked higher. However, links have lost some of their value due to some sites blocking links to fight spam and other sites buying and selling links, making them less trustworthy.
That takes us to the social signals conversation!
What is a social signal?
A social signal is essentially a vote for a website’s relevancy or usefulness that search engines gather from different social media outlets. Social media provides a validation of the quality of a link by the number of times the content is either shared, liked or commented on. So if your business is on various social media platforms, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc., you can already see benefits in your rankings online.
Search engines see your presence on these various sites and this validates your business’ relevancy and legitimacy. In addition to just having a presence on these sites, having a growing presence benefits your organic rankings even more. When Google is crawling the web, they are looking for content, businesses, products that will benefit their consumers. If your pages are growing on social media, Google takes this as a signal that consumers are finding your service or product as useful and interesting. Thus, when they search for it on Google, or other search engines, your business will rank higher.
Then individual posts can be ranked as well. The keywords and content that you post across your social media platforms indicate what kind of business or product you are. Then if you get your audience to engage with that content, this will all increase your rankings online! These interactions are all positive votes for your content and search engines see that.
Recently, social signals have played a more important role in SEO. A good SEO strategy will include traditional SEO techniques coupled with a social media campaign to get your company on as many platforms as possible, spreading the word that your business is important to consumers.
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