What exactly does social media have to relate to SEO? At MWI, we get lots of questions from our current and prospective clients. Social media is a rapidly expanding marketing channel that many companies have only just begun making use of in the past few years, but it’s essential to utilize it particularly if you’re investing resources into search engine optimization. Creating and managing social media accounts are crucial to support SEO efforts, even though the benefits may not be immediately obvious. Here are five reasons why social media is essential for SEO.
1.) Social Media Signals
It’s no secret that Google, Bing, and other search engines make use of online conversations in their algorithm for ranking. If people tweet, share, like, comment or share the content that is known as a social engagement. The more the number of social interactions that a piece content receives, the more social signals it will bring to your site. Search engines look at these signals from social media, and then use them as a quality factor when ranking the content. It’s a way to determine what content is popular with users over what their algorithm determines to be of high quality. A piece of content can be instantly indexed if it’s receiving a lot of social engagement.
2.) Link Building
It’s long gone from the time that you could make a request for hyperlinks from other sites. Since the introduction of Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithm SEOs must do link building the old fashioned way to create quality content which is relevant to linking. How do you reach websites who are willing to link to your site, if the request is thought to be “unnatural”? Social media is the way to go. Social media lets you publish your content to appropriate audiences that are willing to share it with others, when it’s worthy of linking to. Those people will also connect your content to their networks, further increasing the influence of your content.
3) Content Amplification
It doesn’t matter how high-quality your content is, it won’t gain traction without amplification. Sure, email marketing can be a great way to amplify the content, but it’ll only reach people within your marketing database. Social media lets you connect with new audiences through your content. If you publish your content to your followers, Rhlug.pileus.org/wiki/Five_Reasons_Why_Social_Media_Is_Important_For_SEO they’ll share it with their own followings If they are satisfied with the content. These people will then spread the word to their networks, further increasing your reach. In return, you will gain an abundance of relevant traffic, inbound links, social signals and brand awareness All of which are used by search engines in determining the quality of the content.
content amplification lifecycle
4) Brand Communication and Awareness
Brand image and recognition can tell search engines much about the credibility of your site and how much it is respected in their ranking algorithms. Social media aids in building brand awareness and increases the quality of the content you publish. This is what Google refers to as co-citation. Building these co-citations using social media can improve the trust Google has in your website , and will also help by using branded search terms.
5.) Social Indexing
Since the search engines are able to index social media accounts these profiles are now showing in search results pages. This allows your business to show up in search results for brand-related queries, which aren’t restricted to your website. This is even better. Individual tweets on Twitter were once indexed and shown in search results as well – enabling another way for your website to be ranked in search. That was only temporary for a couple of months, until Google decided to discontinue the service, and it’s still in place. Google will once again show tweets in search results, so it’s important to leverage it for getting your content ranked.