What exactly does social media have to have to do with SEO? At MWI we hear lots of questions from our current and prospective clients. While social media has become a growing channel for marketing in recent times, many companies have not yet started to benefit from it. This is especially true when you’re investing in search engine optimization. While the benefits of using social media might not be immediately apparent, they’re essential for SEO support. Below are five reasons why social media is important for SEO.
1.) Social Media Signals
It’s no secret that Google, Bing and other major search engines have been using online dialogue in their ranking algorithms for some period of time. If people tweet, share, like or comment on the content they like that is known as a social engagement. The more social engagements your content has, the more social signals it will bring to your site. Search engines evaluate the social signals they receive, and consider it a quality factor when ranking content. It’s a way to determine what content people find useful and what their algorithm decides is of high quality. If an article receives lots of engagement on social media the content can be indexed.
2) Link Building
It’s long gone of going out and asking for websites to link to yours. Google’s Panda/Penguin algorithm has forced SEOs to build links the old-fashioned way: زيادة عدد ساعات يوتيوب write quality content that is relevant. But how do you reach sites who are willing to link to your content if asking them directly is considered an “unnatural” link building practice? Social media is your solution. Social media enables you to place your content in front of relevant groups of people who may be convinced to link to it if it’s worth linking to. These people may also be able to share your content with their friends, further increasing the influence of your content.
3.) Content Amplification
You can make all the high quality content you want however it will not gain an enormous amount of attention without amplification. Email marketing is an excellent method of amplifying the content you create, but it won’t be able to reach the people on your list of marketing contacts. Social media lets you expand your reach with your content. If you post your content to your followers, they’ll share it with their own followers when they find it useful. They will also recommend your content to their followers, increasing your reach. You will also gain relevant traffic and inbound links social signals, inbound linking, and brand awareness and can be used by search engines for content to determine the quality of your content.
content amplification lifecycle
4.) Brand Awareness & Signals
Brand recognition and brand identity can inform search engines much about the credibility of your site and the degree to which it should be considered reliable in their ranking algorithms. Apart from boosting the quality of your content social media can also help increase brand recognition. Google calls this co-citation. Making these co-citations with social media can improve Google’s trust and confidence 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 sites, they are now showing as search results. This allows your business to be listed in search results on search queries that are branded and not only restricted to your business’s website. This is even more effective. Tweets that were individual from Twitter were once indexed and displayed in the search results. This allowed your website to rank higher in the results of a search. This was just temporary for a few months until Google took the decision to end it , up to now. Google will once again show tweets in search results, so it’s important to leverage it for getting your content ranked.