Does Social Media Presence Influence SEO? -

The usefulness of Social Media and SEO is not something new to us. Both of them have their own space of authority and importance that is beyond description. We won’t beat the same trumpet again and again. Let us have a different view of these two online marketing plans. We will analyse the correlation between SEO and SMO and understand their holistic benefits.

A few quick questions before we start:

Social media and SEO strategy co-exist, but can they work collaboratively for you?
Do you think combining SEO and social media would be of great advantage than focusing on a single one?
Should online businesses that heavily rely on search engines plan for social media optimisation too?
Do Google and other search engine rank a website based on its social media presence and popularity?
If social media marketing boost up search engine ranking, what are the mechanisms behind it?
How to ensure optimum results (Ranking as well as visitors) out of these two marketing plans?

Well, to begin with social media platforms are no more just a place for chatting, status update and photo sharing. It is far more than what we have seen so far. Since social networking sites have gained huge popularity among real human users, search engines cannot help but consider this upsurge into account for ranking. The influence of social media into SEO is well-established and has already taken a solid shape. However, there are people who are yet to believe the fact and still continue focusing on a single method – primarily SEO.

If you are one of those who are still not convinced, here are a few full-proof reasons why social media marketing is highly recommended to ensure improved and consistent ranking on SERPs.

Nowadays Facebook likes, shares & reshares; Google+’s +1ds, Twitter’s retweets, favourites; Pinterest’s repins are considered as important social signals. Search engines use these social signals to determine content quality and relevance. Thus social signals can influence ranking and visibility on SERPs.

If social profiles are strong in terms of connections and popularity they most likely to appear on the SERPs.

Google takes a close look at how people share and rate your website contents on various social media sites.

4. Author Rank is crucial:

Google values contents having Authorship markup. Author rank is the new way of ranking contents and this seems to be the next big thing in the SEO. Contents that are written by established authors with verified Google+ profiles usually appear on top of the SERPs. Author Rank is powered by Google+ authorship markup.

The latest version of Google analytics feature social media monitoring and measuring tools. This means now Google can track how your social media marketing campaigns are progressing. Here is a clear evidence of how Google interprets social media in website ranking.

There are a few more indications to look at :

Geo-tagged content –Facebook and Foursquare use check in system and thus become indicators of physical locations. Google uses web citation of physical address for verifying location on Google places. Al these factors are the part of local organic search results.

Geo-tagged media – When people upload or share images and on their Smartphones they don’t switch off geo-tagging option. Thus search engines can collect the meta data about the time, location, date of the media created. This helps search engines to track user behaviour which is then used to show relevant and user-driven search results.

To summarise, social media has a strong influence on reputation management of a website or a person. If a group of people or a company is talking good about you on Digg, MySpace, YouTube or other popular social networking sites there is a good chance your site will show up on the first page of Google SERPs for your name or your site. However, SMO can affect SEO negatively if you are not doing it correct. It is up to you to channelise it in a proper direction.