The Growing Importance Of Social Media In SEO Efforts

There were many considerable changes in the SEO world in the last two years. For starters, with the release of Google Penguin algorithm April of last year, websites that participated in link schemes, such as buying or selling links, an excessive amount link exchanges, linking to spammers or unrelated sites in order to manipulate search engine rankings, have been penalized.

Another noteworthy change in recent times is that websites have to be made primarily for users, instead of search engines, which was the the usual practice before. These days, search engines put higher importance to the overall experience of the site visitors. For web sites to rank higher, their owners should find ways to encourage people to stay for a longer period on the site and decrease bounce rates.

Creating top quality content is also further highlighted in the last couple of years. The Panda algorithm released by Google in 2011 lowered the rankings of websites that had poorly made content. Website owners have to make sure that content they put up are natural sounding; does not have spelling, stylistic, and factual errors; thorough; helpful and engrossing.

In the past, website content was mostly text-based. These days, content come in various forms, and some of the popular types include videos, infographics, podcasts, and powerpoint presentations. Making exceptionally creative and shareable content also became essential for blogs aiming to get better rankings on the search results page.

One of the most interesting changes in the SEO world is the growing importance of social media in a websites ranking. In the past, links were more important than social signals. But at present, social signals are already thought of as an equally important ranking variable, and many experts believe that it will become considerably more crucial in the near future. The biggest influence of social media is that it helps web sites generate new inbound links. It does this by raising brand awareness and by extension your online presence. Interestingly, websites which have a solid social media presence enjoy lowered bounce rates, which in turn, helps them obtain better rankings on the SERP.

With the growing importance of social signals, numerous online vendors provide services to help you quickly build up your social media presence. For example, they can help you increase YouTube views, for a fee, by utilizing bots or or recruiting people to check out and subscribe to your social media accountsand share your content. While useful, artificial social signals, when used too much, are frowned upon by search engines. The best practice of obtaining social signals is via organic means. This involves integrating your social media channels to your web site or blog. This can be accomplished by inviting guests of your website to subscribe to your social channels by adding connect buttons on your blog or site, or by having share buttons on your content. To know more about SEO and importance of social media, click here.