What the heck does social media have to do with SEO? MWI receives the information frequently from prospective and current clients. Social media is an incredibly expanding channel of marketing that many businesses have only recently begun taking advantage of in the last couple of years, yet it’s very important to leverage particularly if you’re investing resources into search engine optimization. The creation and management of social media accounts is extremely important to assist in SEO initiatives, but their benefits aren’t immediately evident. Below are five reasons why social media is important for SEO.
1) Social Media Signals
It’s not a secret that Google, Bing and other major search engines are using online dialogue in their algorithm for ranking for quite some period of time. When people tweet, like, comment or share the content that is known as a social engagement. A piece of content that has the highest number of social engagements will be able to show more social signals. Search engines look at these signals from social media, and then use them as an element of quality when evaluating the content. This allows search engines to know the content that people are most interested in and what algorithm they believe to be top-quality. The content you’ve created can be immediately indexed whenever it’s attracting a significant amount of engagement on social media.
2.) Link Building
It’s been a long period when you could just get links from other websites. With the emergence of Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithm SEOs are now forced to perform link building in the old fashioned way and create content of high-quality which is relevant to linking. How do you reach websites that are willing to link to your website, even if they are thought to be «unnatural»? Social media is your answer. Social media allows you to publish your content to people who are willing to link to it when it’s worthy of linking to. They will also share your content with their friends, further increasing the influence of your content.
3) Content amplification
It doesn’t matter how good your content is, it’s unlikely to be popular in the absence of amplifying it. Sure, email marketing is an excellent way to increase the reach of your content, but it can only reach people within your marketing database. Social media enables you to increase the reach of your content. If you post your content to your followers, they will spread it to their own followers If they are satisfied with the content. The people who share it will promote your content to their followers, which will increase your reach. Additionally, you will gain relevant traffic, inbound linking social signals, inbound linking, and brand awareness These are used by search engines to determine content quality determination.
content amplification lifecycle
4.) Brand Recognition and Signals
Brand recognition and brand identity can tell search engines an awful lot about the overall quality of your site and the extent to which it can be considered reliable in their ranking algorithms. Social media aids in building brand awareness and amplifies your content. This is what Google refers to as co-citation. Building these co-citations using social media will help improve the trust Google has in your web page and also assist by bringing in search queries that are branded.
5.) Social Indexing
Since search engines are able to index social media accounts and display them on search results pages. This allows your business to be listed in search results on search queries that are branded and not limited to your company website. But it gets even better than that. Individual Tweets from Twitter were initially indexed and included in search results too which gave another means for your content to rank in search. It was temporary, 192.41.27.51/mediawiki/5_Reasons_Social_Media_Is_Important_For_SEO however it was a short-term solution, and Google stopped it after a couple of months. Google will once again show tweets in search results, so it’s important to leverage it for getting your content ranked.