What are the Benefits of Social Media to Search Engines?

Benefits of Social Media to Search Engines

For a while search engine marketers believed that the extent of social media exposure that a business had made a direct impact on SEO. In fact, many social media campaigns were designed around social media.

Not too long ago though, Google’s Matt Cutts released a video in which he said that social media metrics did not have an impact on search engine optimization. In other words, it doesn’t matter how many followers you have on Twitter or on Facebook – at the end of the day it doesn’t help your website to rank higher. Does that mean that social media doesn’t really help your website on search engines?

Not quite social media and SEO continue to work in tandem because of the backlink effect. Every time you put out a post on social media that links back to your website users will hopefully click on it and be redirected back to your homepage. These are high quality inbound links – you are getting traffic from the highest authority websites there ever were, and search engines are not ignorant of that fact.

The thing you have to be careful about is the kind of content that you are putting out on social media. Search engines look into this – they are in favour of high quality content that is informative and relevant to your audience.

If, for example, all you do is post links to your website on your Twitter or Facebook accounts you will not get much recognition by search engines – you haven’t pit out much by way of good content. If, however, you take the time to craft content that will get users interested enough to loop back to your website search engines will see this activity and your website will get better ranking. Bottom line – social media requires the same thing that your website does – high quality content.

There is another way that social media influences search engines. Imagine that you do such a good job of social media websites that they are all abuzz about your website or product. Every time a user sees so many followers they will want to see what you are all about, and they will click on your link and land on your website. This activity will help your site get ranked by spiders and eventually you will be on the first page of search results.

The mistake that many small business owners make is managing social media for business the same way they manage their own personal accounts. If you want social media to work for your business you need to take a more professional approach. Your posts need to be designed to engage users and to entice them to invite others. The best way to achieve this is to let a professional take care of your social media campaign. Not only will they help you craft the proper content, they will also post it strategically so that it can reach as many people as possible. As you hire an SEO company find out whether they are able to incorporate a social media strategy into their plan.