The effect of Social Media on Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
by Admin
The point of a search engine optimization or SEO is to bring you relevant results based on the keyword(s) that you input.
How do they determine this relevance? They’ll never say exactly, but, at the basic level, it’s a balance
between your content and the popularity of the page.
Let’s ignore content for the moment and focus on popularity. How is this determined by a search
engine? The most important determinant is inbound links; how many people are linking to your site? It
is only logical that if many people are linking to your site, your site must have quality information (spam
links aside – quality counts too). But there are other factors as well.
So how does Social media affect SEO?
Social media is no longer this up-and-coming thing on the Internet
used only by teenagers to gossip with their friends; it is now embraced by older generations as a
platform for communicating with friends, sharing articles, and interacting with businesses. And, it’s been
this way for quite some time. In fact, Google and Bing, the resident search engine giants, divulged way
back in 2010 that they were incorporating social signals into their algorithms.
All the data that is produced by liking, sharing, retweeting and resharing on social media sites is literally
a treasure trove of popularity information. But just how important is it in our search results?
Facebook and Twitter are both massive social networks, numbers 1 and 2 by most estimations. With
well over 1 billion active users a month on Facebook and a staggering 58 million tweets per day, the
power of their data to provide insights to search engines as to what is popular and relevant to actual
people is priceless.
How Social media and SEO Correlates
The correlation can be explained two ways: First, if something is popular on Twitter and Facebook, the
likelihood of someone linking to it on their blog or +ling it on Google+ goes up. We know Google looks
at these signals, if not on Facebook and Twitter, so you see the boost in search ranking.
Second, if a website is ranking high in the search engines the logical conclusion is that more eyes are
seeing the page. If more people are visiting the page, and we know the percentage of internet users that
have a Facebook page is incredibly high, then logic tells us that page is much more likely to receive
additional likes on Facebook and more tweets on Twitter. So, it is also possible that the inverse is what
we are seeing: high search engine rankings are causing more Facebook likes. Remember, correlation
does not always equal causation.
To answer the second part of the question, yes, it is worthwhile to focus on Facebook and Twitter, but
not for direct linking benefits. It is the interactions that come from your updates and tweets that get you
links to sites that Google can crawl and we know that these have benefits.
The fact is, Popularity on social sites, especially on Google+, does correlate with high search engine
ranking. And we do have the Google and Bing testimony that they incorporate social signals into their
calculations. But, without access to the sacred algorithms, we will never truly know how much weight
they carry. From the outside, all we can see are the correlations.
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This blog post is fantastic. Some great SEO tips man. I agree with you. Thanks for sharing them. Keep up the good content.