Understanding Social Signals For Your SEO Strategy

Whilst a well-planned and thought out search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is the key to creating a successful website, there are a range of components at play that can really affect your efforts. One of the most helpful (and damaging) components for SEO is social media, which has the ability to give your website authority (as well as the ability to take it away). This is why it is important for any SEO expert to understand the various social signals of networking sites.

• Authority (or influence)
  When a business creates a social networking profile, the ultimate aim of SEO is to attract as many followers as possible (hundreds is always best). In order for the search engine spiders to index and rank your profile, you need to get your followers to interact with your profile’s content on a regular basis. To do this, you will need to use SEO to create a strong call to action on your social media profile – ask visitors to ‘Like’ or ‘Follow’ your page, or encourage followers to share your posts.
  The more people who subscribe and engage with your content via SEO, the more authoritative your business will be considered (which causes your website and other associated profiles to rank much higher).

• User engagement
  If you haven’t noticed before, a social media profile that has an effective SEO strategy in place will also garner high SERP results. This is due to the number of users engaging with your content – the more SEO content interaction, the more relevant the information is considered by the search engine spiders.
  The more people who ‘Like’, ‘Follow’, share and re-post your content, the more relevant and helpful the search engine spiders consider it. This means that one of the major parts of your SEO strategy should be encouraging users to interact with your content.

• Reach
  It is not only enough to have people engaging and sharing your SEO content on the various social media platforms in place (such as Facebook) – the number of times that it is actually shared is also important for SEO. Your content should be share-able on a number of platforms, not just the one it was initially posted to.
  The more people who share your information, the more influential and helpful your content is considered by the search engine spiders. When people want to share your information with their friends, you know you’re onto a winning SEO strategy.

SEO experts need to understand the various social signals in place when it comes to implementing a strategy for their social media profiles. It is not only enough to get users to ‘Like’ or ‘Follow’ your profile anymore – they need to consistently engage and share your content in order for the SEO strategy to be considered a success.