Your Guide to Social Signals for SEO | SEOmoz

Your Guide to Social Signals for SEO | SEOmoz

Jayson DeMers updates us on how much social media signals are used by the search engines in ranking pages on the search engines. Excellent article, you really must read if you are developing your social media strategy.

In this article he sets out to answer how social signals improved rankings, what is the future for social signals, and what steps need to be taken immediately to embrace these changes.

Jayson concludes that there are indirect and direct contributions to rankings:

• Direct – such as the number of Twitter followers or Facebook likes
• Indirect – such as inbound links and citations

The most powerful facet of social media marketing is the simple fact that it generates much improved visibility to your webpages and hence generates incoming links as a consequence. The search engine algorithms have not changed in that respect, more links equals better rankings.

It is not possible to define quantitatively the impact of social media links on search engine rankings, but there now seems little doubt that they do contribute and that the contribution will be increasing in the forthcoming years.

What actions should you be taking now?

1. If you have not already done so, sign up and utilise Twitter as your major social media platform.
2. If you have not already done so, set up a Blog for your website and start publishing regularly good quality content.
3. Set up Google Authorship and Google Publishership for all your content including Blog posts and forum posts where possible

What do you think? Post your comments and own experiences below . . . . .

---

Related posts:

1. People Are Increasingly Turning To Social Over Search
2. The definitive guide of how to measure the ROI of your social media activity
3. Is it Possible To Overdo Your Company’s Social Media Presence?
4. Does Google use data from social sites in ranking? – YouTube
5. Facebook EdgeRank: “One Of The Most Important Algorithms In Marketing.”