Social Signals Can Help With SEO

Social media is a growing part of any online marketing strategy, probably expanding at a rate greater than any other single factor when it comes to your website promotion.  Having a strong social presence is not an option for a small business internet marketing specialist, it is an absolute necessity.
Social media is not difficult to set up, and, if you do it yourself, then it costs virtually nothing but your time.  Keeping up with it can be time consuming, and some small business internet marketing specialist choose to work with SEO companies that can help them keep better track of how the social campaign is not only implemented, but how the effects are helping their SEO.  Social media can help to increase traffic to your website, which can help dramatically as you are seeking a great search engine placement.

What to Look For

When you work with an SEO company to determine how the social sites are affecting your SEO campaign, there are a few specific signals that they will use to determine just how successful your plan actually is.  When it comes to Facebook, for example, one of the social signals that seem to be important are how many “likes” your page gets.  This helps determine how many people may have visited your Facebook Page and determined that it is something worth talking about in the social media.  A large number of likes can help with your SEO.  When you have these numbers, the friends of those who “liked” your page are more likely to take a look, and may even “like” the page themselves.  This can help to grow your following, and it can happen very quickly.
Another Facebook tool that develops social signals that can be measured is the “share” option.  This tells you how many people decided that they would repost something that you posted as a status, or a blog post or an article.  This helps to give you great exposure, and tells you that your contacts and readers are finding that your information is something that they are looking for, and that they think others would be interested as well.  Having your content “shared” is better exposure than having it “liked,” since the share would appear on more news feeds.
On Twitter, the number of followers that you can accumulate can help determine how many people are accessing your information.  The more followers, the better.  Gaining followers on Twitter is often as simple as following others.  Many Twitter users will re-follow those who follow them.  Use hashtags with your keywords, and try to enter into conversations about trending topics that are related to your niche, this will help you become more a part of the Twitter community and build up a large number of followers and get more exposure.  People who follow you have the option to “retweet” your information, and the more retweets that you get can help when measuring the social signals that are going to help determine how much social media is helping with your SEO.

Does Google Use Social Signals?

The jury is still out when it comes to the importance of social signals for actual indexing of sites.  But, what is known is that you can get a large number of links, and that is measured by Google.  Google may not know how that you have thousands of followers on Twitter, or how many “likes” you have on Facebook, but they do know how many links you have.  And the ones that come from the big shot social media sites are considered to be quality links, ones you definitely want to seek out.
It has also been shown that those sites with strong social media signals, like the ones mentioned above, end up with lower bounce rates from visitors, because they often know what to expect when they arrive at the site, which can keep them there longer.  Lower bounce rates are definitely good for your SEO, and make a difference when it comes to search engine placement.
While we directly discussed Facebook and Twitter, and a separate discussion may be required for Google+, don’t forget about this growing social media network, either.  Google definitely uses the information obtained from this network, and considers the social signals that are related to it—including the number of people in your circles, the number of circles you have, etc., when considering your site’s search engine placement.
There are indirect and direct benefits to your SEO tactics when you are actively involved in the social media, and there are multiple signals that can be measured by you, or by the SEO company that you are working with to prove the effectiveness of using social media to increase your traffic, using social media for website promotion and using social media for a better search engine placement.