Social Media Does Affect Search Engine Rankings

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A couple of weeks ago, Search Engine Land published an article about how social media is affecting search rankings after an interview with Google and Bing: What Social Signals Do Google & Bing Really Count?

Both search engines answered questions about what they look at in social media and how this can influence rankings for a particular web page, blog post or article etc.

What this means for your web presence is that your social media activities can influence how your pages or posts rank and therefore means that these activities are becoming more important. Some of you may have noticed over the last few months how search engines are becoming increasingly social with Twitter messages now appearing in search results, public Facebook pages / profiles being indexed, and Google now including reviews in applications such as Google Places. With the increasing importance of social media, the search engines are bringing this into search results and creating social media applications themselves.

The search engines even admit that if links are tweeted by someone they deemed to be ‘authoritative’ on the social networks, those links can be worth even more, so those using social media successfully can give even more help to the links they tweet.

If you’ve been reluctant to use the social media tools up to now, then you really need to work out how to use them for your business as social media is going to become even more important over the next few years – it’s only going to increase in popularity.

For those of you already using the social media channels, the next step is to make sure you keep up to date with what’s being said about you. It’s really important this is taken seriously, even for the smallest businesses. We’ve covered some tools to help monitor your reputation a previous blog post, ‘Do you know what they’re saying about you?’

For more on SEO & social media, this blog post from TopRankBlog explains more on how to develop social networks to engage customers and promote content: 4 Steps to Social Media SEO Success

What are your views on how social media is going to become increasingly important? Please share them here!

About Sam

Sam McArthur is an internet marketing consultant with 12 years in the industry. She helps professional service businesses with their internet marketing strategy, helping them to see significant results from their online marketing activities, particularly within the search engines. She also consults on the latest internet tools, technology and best practice techniques.