What the heck does social media have to have to do with SEO? At MWI we hear lots of questions from our the current and potential clients. Social media is a fast expanding channel of marketing that many companies have only started taking advantage of in the last few years, however it’s vital to take advantage of it – especially if you’re investing resources in SEO. Making and managing social media accounts is important to assist in SEO efforts, though the benefits may not be immediately apparent. Below are five reasons why social media is vital to SEO.

1) Social Media Signals

It’s no secret that Google, alexa ترتيب المواقع (click now) Bing, and other search engines rely on online conversation as part of their algorithm for ranking. A social engagement happens the time when people share, like, comment or share a tweet about content. The more the number of social interactions that a piece content has, the more social signals you send to your website. Social signals are utilized by search engines to determine the quality of content. This allows search engines to decide what people find most useful and also what they consider to be top-quality. If an article is receiving lots of social interaction It can be quickly indexed.

2.) Link Building

It’s been a long time that you could go out and ask for hyperlinks from other sites. In the wake of Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithm SEOs are now forced to build links using the old-fashioned method to create quality content which is relevant to linking. How can you get your content to websites who are willing to link to your site, if they are considered “unnatural”? Social media is the answer. Social media lets you put your content in front of relevant groups of people who may be attracted to link to it should it be worthy of linking to. These people may also share your content with their friends, further increasing the influence of your content.

3) Content Amplification

You can write all the high quality content you want but it’s not going to gain any traction without amplifying it. Sure, email marketing is an excellent method to amplify content, but it can only reach people within your marketing database. Social media enables you to reach new audiences with your content. After you have shared your content, your following will also be able to share it with their followers if they find it useful. Then those people will be able to share it with their followers, further increasing your reach. As a result, you get lots of relevant traffic, inbound links, brand recognition and social signals These are all used by search engines in determining the quality of the content.

content amplification lifecycle

4.) Brand Communication and Awareness

Brand image and recognition can inform search engines an awful lot about the overall quality of your website and the extent to which it can be believed to be in its ranking algorithms. Apart from boosting the quality of your content Social media can also build brand awareness. This is what Google refers to as a co-citation. These co-citations can be developed via social media in order to increase Google’s trust as well as aid with branded searches.

5) Social Indexing

Since the search engines index social media profiles which means they show on search results pages. This allows your company to appear in search results for branded search queries that are not limited to just your own website. It’s even more effective. Tweets on their own from Twitter were once searchable and displayed in search results. This allowed your content to be ranked higher in the search results. It was temporary, however it was a short-term solution, and Google shut it down after couple of months. Google will once again show tweets in search results, so it’s important to leverage it for getting your content ranked.