Does it view a piece of content and the links published on them any different? No, it treats them like a regular HTML page of a website.
Coming to social signals, Google doesn’t take the number of social media shares or followers into consideration when ranking a web property. Because it would be too easy for anyone to cheat the system and have an undeserving site ranked higher than a deserving one.
Also, it’s important to note that social media shares happen 24/7. And they take place quicker than Google can catch up, which makes it difficult for the search engine giant to crawl and keep track of them.
We do not know how much data Google has access to from the major “must-login” social media sites, and we’re not sure if they use it for ranking purposes.
What we do know is social media plays an indirect role in helping people find your brand in the search engine results.
And for now, that’s all that matters.
One of the biggest benefits of SEO is gaining more visibility and getting more people to organically visit your website. Social media marketing, on the other hand, is about making the most of social networks and getting found on them by the right people. They both might look different but have overlapping goals. In essence, they work together. This is why search engines are becoming more social, and social networks are turning into valuable search engines.
An effective social media strategy has to have a solid SEO plan in place because both of them go hand and in hand.
Let’s look into three valid reasons as to why you should focus your efforts on social media if you want to enhance your SEO results.
Reason#1: Social Media Content Gets Indexed
The right type of social media content published on a regular basis can make a huge difference to your overall content marketing campaign. And when you find out that your social media posts can get crawled by search engine spiders and get indexed, things get better.
Now, this doesn’t mean that every tweet or post you make finds its way to Google’s vast index. It has to be relevant enough so that they can be found by people searching for similar content.
For example, if you search for Oprah Winfrey, you will find most of the top results are her social media profiles/pages.
Because it’s relevant to the search query. What’s even better is that social media can help you get your website’s content indexed faster because of how search engines treat social media content.
If your blog post gets a lot of attention on Facebook or Twitter, it will end up getting in the index at a quicker pace.
Search engine spiders are able to find such content easily because of the social factor.
So if your post goes viral on social media, the ripples can be felt in the search engine result pages.
Reason #2: Social Media Helps Build Authority
Search engines give a lot of weight to a website’s authority, making it a critical SEO factor to focus on. In the eyes of search engines, if your page or domain has a high value, it has high authority. And a better chance to rank above sites with not-so-strong authority.
The authority of a web page or site grows over time. As you keep publishing top-notch content and gain more relevant backlinks, your authority keeps growing. The content that you publish, if valuable, gives your audience what they’re looking for. This in turn earns you backlinks, giving you a number of positive votes.
Back when social media didn’t exist, the link-building world was different. Fast forward to today, you can’t ignore social media when talking about effective link building tips .
Why? Because a good chunk of content on the web is distributed via social media.
It’s the biggest content distribution engine, which means your influence or authority on social media networking sites has a direct impact on the level of authority. That is also why it is considered vital in your content marketing strategy. By focusing on building an engaged network of social media followers, your content has more relevant places to live. And the more relevant places it lives in, the more authority you gain.
For instance, if you create content about Yoga and get backlinks from blogs that specifically write about Yoga, you get more brownie points from Google and other search engines.
They’ll know that you’re publishing content that is reaching a relevant audience.
Reason #3: Social Media Involves Real People
While SEO has a technical side to it, it’s not the only thing you should be focused on. Most of the blackhat or unethical SEO practices are technical in nature, and yet fail to give long-term results because they take the “user” out of the equation. These methods are not about people when search engines are specifically looking for a human touch.
Search engines have always tried to find a better way to serve users and move beyond the technical stuff. If you want to rank a web property in 2019, you can’t just depend on technical factors such as keyword research for SEO and optimization. Your SEO has to have a human element in it in order to get real-world results. Or else it will get beaten by someone who took the time to create valuable content.
With social media growing at warp speed, it is becoming an unavoidable part of SEO, especially because it is made up of real people.
After content, social media can be seen as an integral factor in search. It lets you segregate your audience and target who you want.
Indeed, social media is one of the fastest ways to get to know your audience. Be it a group, customer support channel, or promotion page – whatever purpose it serves your business, it will be easy for you to get feedback. It gives you a bird’s view of everything.
You know where your content is, who it is being consumed and shared by, and the kind of impact it is having, which if you ask us, is huge in terms of SEO.
As web marketers, it’s important to stay ahead of the algorithms. But in order to do that, sometimes you have to take a look back at what once worked but doesn’t any longer . You’ve heard it said those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
If you don’t want the past to haunt your web presence, take a lesson from these five killer SEO tactics from yesterday that will get you killed today.
1) Keyword-Focused Pages
With the Hummingbird update , Google has basically rethought how they want to analyze pages and implemented some new technology to do it. Instead of focusing on the keywords themselves, the search engines are now looking at the ideas represented by the keywords. In other words, it’s not the keywords that the page is ranking for but the topic.
When you optimize content for keywords, you’re being shortsighted. Remember, Google has access to billions and billions of pages of content. And they have the computing power to analyze that content in order to understand what makes one page better than another. If you want to rank for “snow skis,” but your content fails to say much about things that skiers find important (other than they type of ski they use), you’re going to miss the mark. By a long shot.
Google knows what’s important to skiers because they’ve analyzed thousands of pages of content written by those very skiers. They know the language, the lingo, the style and, ultimately, what skiers want to know about their skis, ski slopes and performance in a variety of snow types. Just repeating the word “snow skis” over and over again just won’t cut it.
2) Link Buying
In 2012, Google rolled out the Penguin algorithm designed to target manipulative link building practices. While links remain an important part of the search engine algorithms, paying for links as a way to manipulate the algorithm is severely penalized.
Wary of unnatural link-building practices, the search engines are looking for links that are truly earned. Essentially, link buying is out. But do the search engines really know if you bought a link or not? They can’t be certain, but there are a number of tell-tale signals. Trigger enough of these, and you’ll be in the hurt.
If you do buy links, do it only for advertising purposes. As such, be sure to use a nofollow tag on each and every purchased link. This will allow you to get the traffic without being seen as manipulating the algorithm.
You can still engage in natural link-building practices. But that means no quid pro quo. Feel free to contact other site owners, pointing out something of value on your site and ask if they will link to it. They might.
As important as links are, social media has, essentially, taken their place. Not in terms of algorithmic importance but in terms of the best way to build natural links. Engaging online with your followers, pushing out great content and commenting on other’s content will build relationships that will often turn into links without even asking.
3) Anchor Text Optimization
As part of that “optimization,” SEOs would often go out and secure large numbers of links for the target keyword, all pointing to the same page. The results would be a pretty abnormal link signature. After all, how many people are likely to link to the exact same page of a site using the exact same anchor text?
Maybe a few, but a few algorithm tweaks allowed search engines to sniff out manipulation. Whether you’re paying for links or getting them for free, having your site get hundreds of similar links just raises too many red flags, even if you do spread them out over time.
4) Link Sculpting
The problem with link sculpting is it never really worked. According to Google, a nofollowed link doesn’t prevent the link value from flowing out of the page, it just prevents it from flowing into the linked page . The link value is still lost.
If you have the same ten links, all but one nofollowed, the dofollow link passes only one-tenth of total value available. The other nine-tenths is lost. Gone. Kaput.
Nofollow tags should not be used for internal site links. They should only be used for external links to other sites that you don’t want to pass link value to (or are paid ad links). When you fill your own site with nofollow links to your own pages, you’re just hurting yourself. You’re not hoarding page value, you’re causing it to disintegrate into thin air.
Instead of using HTML, however, you can use JavaScript to trigger the on-click function. Some functions will lead to other pages, but that doesn’t make them function any less. A great example of this is social sharing. That’s a function for the visitor but it’s not a “new page” for them to visit. They do the function and come back. No need to build hyperlinks for those functions when a functional JavaScript will suffice. While Google can follow JavaScript links, there is evidence that they don’t allow link juice to pass through them.
5) Thin Content
While content may be king, too many websites were pushing out content for the sole purpose of ranking, without any regard to the quality of that content. Content producers were ranking and drawing in thousands of visitors which brought in millions of dollars of ad revenue. The only problem was, the visitors were not finding the content valuable.
To combat this, Google rolled out the Penguin update targeting sites with thin and not-so-valuable content. Many sites that earned their living selling ads on these crappy content pages saw their livelihood come crashing down as the search engines made room for sites that invested in producing a higher-caliber of content.
Your goal, as a content producer, is to be known as an authority on your subject matter. That’s hard to do when you produce content that isn’t worth much. Think of your content as an extension of your reputation. Good content improves your reputation. Junk content reduces your reputation. Better content is more likely to get noticed, linked and produce business.
It’s easy to get caught up in algorithm chasing. But instead of chasing the algorithms, we need to have the algorithms chasing us . That means that we avoid the flash-in-the-pan “killer” tactics that are here today and gone tomorrow. Instead, look to build long-term value in everything you do.
Conclusion
Regardless of your marketing goals, by measuring and analyzing your actions and their results, you can get better results.
The last thing you want is to put your efforts in the wrong direction. Proper tracking and analyzing of your social media KPIs lets you understand what’s working and what’s not. So that you can focus on improving the right metrics.
Whether your goal is to keep track of the number of social media shares per post or see how much social referral traffic you’re generating, it’s important to measure the metrics that according to you are helpful.
Before you jump on the social media SEO bandwagon, be clear about your actions, and how you will measure them.
Let go of any guesswork and move your attention towards data.
And you will have the needed clarity to move forward.
