What does social media provide in terms of SEO? At MWI we hear lots of questions from our current and prospective clients. While social media has become an increasingly popular channel for marketing in recent years, the majority of companies have not yet started to profit from it. This is particularly important when you’re investing in SEO. While the advantages of social media might not be immediately apparent, they’re vital for SEO support. Of the many reasons why you should consider social media as a part of your online strategy Here are five reasons it’s important for SEO.

1) Social Media Signals

It’s not a secret that Google, Bing and other major search engines have been using online chat as part of their ranking algorithms for a long time. When people share content via Twitter, Facebook or comment on an article that is known as a social engagement. Content that has more engagements on social media will have more social signals. Search engines measure the social signals they receive, and then use them as an element of quality when evaluating the content. It’s a method of determining what content is popular with users in comparison to what their algorithm determines to be of good quality. A piece of content could be instantly indexed whenever it’s attracting a significant amount of social interaction.

2) Link Building

It’s long gone from the time that you could go out and ask for hyperlinks from other sites. With the emergence of Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithms, SEOs are forced to build links by hand – create high quality content that is linked-worthy. How do you reach websites that are willing to link to your website, even if they are considered “unnatural”? Social media is your answer. Social media lets you post your content and share it with appropriate audiences that are willing to link to your content, if it is worth linking to. These people will share your content with others, increasing your influence.

3) Content Amplification

You can write all the high quality content you want however it will not gain much traction without amplification. Email marketing can be an effective method to increase the reach of your content , but it can only reach people in your marketing list. Social media allows you to expand your reach with your content. If you share your content, the people who follow you will also be able to share it with their followers when they are satisfied with the content. These people will then spread the word to their networks, further increasing your reach. You will also gain relevant traffic as well as inbound linking social signals, inbound linking, and brand recognition and are used by search engines for content to determine the quality of your content.

content amplification lifecycle

4.) Brand Awareness & Signals

The brand’s identity and reputation can inform search engines much about the credibility of your website as well as how much it should be considered reliable in their ranking algorithms. Apart from boosting the quality of your content, social media also helps increase brand recognition. This is what Google refers to as co-citation. Making these co-citations with social media will help improve Google’s trust in your website , and will also help with search queries that are personalized.

5) Social Indexing

Search engines have been indexing the social media pages for some time now, which means they now appear in search result pages. This lets your brand appear in search results for branded searches on more than the site of your business. It’s even better. Individual Tweets from Twitter were previously indexed and appeared in search results, Www.1waan.com/space/uid/61006 too – enabling another way for your website to be ranked in search. It was only temporary for a couple of months, until Google decided to cease using this feature, which is still in effect. Google will once again show tweets in search results, so it’s important to leverage it for getting your content ranked.