The Evolution of SEO & Social Media
I found a great article about this topic this week—about how the effect of social media on SEO is changing so much. It used to be that figuring out how to develop link bait that had the best chance of making it on the front page of social news sites was the thing to do. While this still works and is a good tactic, there is so much more that social media can do nowadays. With sites like Facebook and Twitter, it is possible to build high quality links by using networking and information sharing techniques.
Twitter specifically is being used as a public relations outreach outlet—and it’s effective.
This kind of PR is becoming a new technique for promotion and link building.
It is also a widely believed that social media will be major source of ranking in the future for search engines.
If social media signals would begin to be introduced as a ranking factor, this could allow the search engines “leverage the wisdom of the crowds”.
If users who previously couldn’t vote for content via links from web pages now are able to vote with their tags, bookmarks, clicks, and ratings—this sends a strong signal to the search engines. It also does not simply rely on one web site owner linking to another.
Some don’t believe that social media signals will completely replace links as a ranking signal-but rather complement them. So a link from a highly trusted site will still be considered highly valuable, and at the same time, a number of mentions across many social media sites would also be a strong signal.
For SEO, this means that the skills required to succeed in an SEO project is increasing. There will be a lot more data for the search engines to use, so this is good news for them, and all the while increasing the challenge for SEOs at the same time.
The companies that understand social media and how to use its services as part of a broader PR strategy will most likely get an early advantage over their competition. Knowing this and acting on this can definitely bring some immediate benefits in terms of market exposure now, and most likely will bring a significant advantage of improved search engine rankings in the future.
Good things to keep in mind!
