My last blog post explained what backlinks (inbound links) are and how they can assist you in better rankings. This post focuses on the benefits of social media and how it can bring you more traffic.
The use of Social media by businesses has been on a steady increase for years now. There are many benefits of using Social Media such as increased website views, product and service promotion and lead generation. Most importantly, social media has become an important part of Search Engine Optimization that it is considered an essential component like link building (backlinks) and choosing the right keywords.
Businesses are now defined by their network. People who know our business are making recommendations to other about what content to read, what posts to like, and who to follow. While focusing on keywords is still important, there must also be a focus on ensuring that your information is shareable and that it is making it into the hands of influencers. Which brings us to the next point.
For years now, both Google and Bing have incorporated social signals into their algorithms. Social signals are similar to the concept of inbound links; the more links a site has linking in to it, the more it is seen by the search engines as an authority and the higher it will be ranked. Social signals work in a similar way; the more content shared by users with a high influence, the more weight that content has with the search engines. Influencers are people with a large pool of connections that have a high level of sway on what their connections see, watch and share across social media channels. Though frequently influencers have some level of fame, they can also be industry leaders, authors, speakers, or anyone seen as an expert.
Search engines are now relying on social media users to tell them what content is valuable. Getting your content into the hands of influencers is an important step to making sure your content gets shared across all networks, creates the right kind of social signals, and gets that content ranked.
Stay tuned for my next blog post that will talk about setting up a Google places page.