How social media helps Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Josh Cline | Monday, August 30th, 2010 | 2 Comments »
What attracts Google’s crawler (also Yahoo’s and Bing’s, but let’s focus on Google right now) is commotion. Fresh, interesting and catchy articles and conversations that shake up the web.
Here’s the equation:
On the one hand you have “Social Media,” which is where the discussions and conversations take place. What people talk about matters. On the other hand, you have quality links to pages. Good links from various sources attract search crawlers. If you combine social media attention with the right link-building layout, your page gets to the top of the search engine results page (SERPs) quickly.
This cannot be done automatically or outsourced to cheap, unprofessional labor. Pseudo SEO services that provide “1000 incoming links / 500 social bookmarks” are also very useless and a waste of money. At worst, they can actually lower your search rankings or even get you banned completely.
Web crawlers are getting stronger and faster, more topic-sensitive and increasingly better at processing natural language patterns. Resistance is futile (eventually).
What too many SEO companies seem to ignore is that social media is becoming increasingly important, especially with Google’s recent May Day and Caffeine updates, to bring top rankings quickly.
Live and kicking social media activity acts as little pings resonating with original material (a web page, a product, a brand name, a news story, etc.). The more activity and excitement there is over you, the more search engines are interested in finding the original post or the target URL (let’s say, your new website) that everyone is talking about, and will rank highly. This is partially because social media saves Google processing time and money by pointing out valuable stuff.
Social media helps search engines to provide users with fresh, valuable and newsworthy pages. Search engines care about what people are interested in, not about what marketers try to force down their throats, and social media is currently one of the best tools search engines can use to come up with great results.
Social media buzz sparks more incoming links – from user profile updates, comments, tweets & retweets and blog posts. Create something valuable, propel it with the right social media platforms and tools and if your stuff is valuable you can get a lot of links and establish yourself as authoritative in the eyes of search engines.
Interesting thoughts here on social media and SEO. While social media can help gain exposure for pages you are looking to build links, the comment above “even get you banned completely” simply doesn’t apply. If it were, I could build hundreds of links to one of my competitors in an attempt to drop his/her ranking from #1. More links is a good thing. Most high ranking websites have a good link diversity that got them there in the first place. Social media has an added benefit of only working if a link goes viral and if it does, then it appears natural to search engines.
I think a better way to explain this would be to say that links don’t necessarily help. An example – if you take a single HTML page and put 500 links to the same site, the search engines are smart enough to discount at least 499 of them and may in fact discount all.
It isn’t that it lowers you ranking or gets you banned so much as it fails to help up the ranking. More, the site that abuses the algorithms – that has the 500 links on the page – is the one that might be banned or ignored. The strength of social media has always been its ability to drive traffic to your site – but more, to enable you to reach such a larger audience to whom you can pitch the site.
This is, despite what might appear to be nitpicking on my part, an excellent explanation for many as to the important connections between social media and SEO, with a wise caution against simply trusting any one who says they are an SEO expert…because they say so.