Social Media’s effect on SEO
Search ranking is important to all website owners, having your site rank highly in the organic listings for terms relevant to your brand or product is vital, in this blog post we take a look at how Social Media channels can help with ranking.
Whilst Google has never released details of their algorithm, there aren’t any hard and fast statements as to how to use Social Media to bring your page-ranking up, however, SEO gurus have been able to make correlations between some social features and high ranking pages. This post is focused on Social but to delve deeper in to search ranking factors take a look at Moz’s search ranking report.
URL Shares
The correlation data presented by Moz showed that page-level social metrics (defined by Moz as: quantity/quality of tweeted links, Facebook shares, Google +1s etc. to the page) was ninth on their list for broad areas that influenced page-ranking. What this means in terms of the social signals is that pages of your website that get shared either by users clicking on a share button on your site, or by users posting a link to your website content on social media channels, the more chance your page has of ranking highly in organic search listings.
How social is your business?
Does your business make fan acquisition and increasing followers a priority? Whilst according to Matt Cutts, (Google’s former head of web spam) there isn’t a direct correlation between the numbers of fans and followers your social channels have and your Google ranking one thing can be said for your Social efforts – the more fans and followers you have the more chance you have of interaction and engagement by way of likes, comments and shares, which in turn could lead to more inbound links to your website. That said, quality is more important than quantity but if you can achieve quality and quantity then your social strategy is standing you in good stead to see more of your content shared and increased visibility. After all having your brand visible on social media will make your brand more recognisable to potential new social fans and business customers.
In summary, focus on quality content that will entertain, inform and inspire your website users and social followers to share your content and engage with your brand thus improving visibility and generating more website traffic.
