Social Media and Search Engine Rankings

Whenever I discuss website design with my clients, I always stress the importance of including Social Media in their overall marketing plan. In fact, the effect that Social Media has on Search Engine Rankings is often very much misunderstood.

Everyone knows how important it is for a business to have a website, yet not everyone understands how important Social Media is to Search Engine Rankings.

For years, traditional SEO strategies  (rich text links, backlinks, keywords, etc) were the way to get good Search Engine Rankings. Those strategies should still be used, but now the focus is more on the content, and the way that users are reacting to the content (sharing, re-tweeting, pinning, liking, commenting, etc).

How Is Social Media related to Search Engine Rankings?

Social Signals (likes, shares, votes, pins, etc), are now playing a big part at how search engines rank websites. Research is showing us that search engines (like Google) are taking notice of social sharing. Think of Social Signals as a quick note to Google that says “Hey, look at me. People are sharing my stuff”.

Just to be clear, Google says that it doesn’t matter to them, for example, how many Twitter followers you have or how many Facebook likes you have. That does not enter into their algorithm for page rankings. However, they also say that Social Media pages are treated like any other pages in their web index and that they can show up in search results.

I love this gifographic (animated infographic) that Neil Patel put together for Sprout Social that really shows the correlation between Social Sharing and Search Engine Rankings.

And just in case you though Google+ was dead, pay special attention to that part of the gifographic. There’s this little company called Google that might care about it. Make sure that it is a part of your Social Marketing Strategy.

Courtesy of: Quick Sprout

What are your thoughts about Social Sharing with regards to Search Engine Rankings? Let us know in the comments!

Oh, and if you would ever like to chat about Social Media Strategy or Website Design, feel to drop us a line. We’d love to hear from you.

And of course we love it when people share our content!