In recent years, social media has been said to have a more substantial impact on SEO than it has ever had in the past. Social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Youtube and even Pinterest are now learned to benefit your search engine optimization campaigns substantially. The reason why is quite clear. These social media sites are heavily frequented by consumers today, so having an online presence on the sites says a lot about your professionalism and branding as a business. Below, you’ll find the top five reasons why this is so and you will also learn the importance of incorporating social media into your SEO.
Google has been implementing a lot of changes in the search results and many of these have been focused on social media. Authorship is one of the most significant changes that Google has made. Now, when you have a search engine listing, your picture can be displayed beside the result, which designates you as the author of the content. In order to capitalize on this, you have to have a Google+ account. Additionally, shares that your content has received and likes from Facebook can be displayed next to your search engine listings.
When you are a member of a social site like Facebook, search engines like Google can use the types of status updates that you publish and the content that you view as an indication of what you enjoy. They can then personalize your search engine rankings so that websites most relevant to your lifestyle are displayed at the top of the results. At the moment, it still in debate whether or not Google is actively doing this already, but it’s something that could always happen down the line.
Having an active presence on social media websites provides links back to your website. When you publish a blog post on your website, you can syndicate an excerpt of that post to your social media accounts and you can link back to the blog post through this status update. This link can actually benefit your search engine rankings. Since, as most webmasters know, backlinks are one of the most important factors to improving your rankings on search engines.
It’s no secret that Google and even Bing have begun experimenting with author rank. Author ranking is where certain authors are given more credibility, improving their search engine rankings more than others. This is a concept that that works seamlessly with the Google authorship system, where your picture and name is displayed next to your search engine listings.
The number of shares and likes that your content has on Facebook and similar websites is also expected to improve your search engine rankings. Of course, shares and likes have to be combined with backlinks in order to have a significant effect on your rankings, but in general, the more your content is syndicated on social media sites, the better your search engine rankings will be.
