DailyBlogr - SEOs shift to social

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Did you know that social media signals are now significant factors within Googles ranking system? Now there are other components to associate with ranking pages outside of standard links and on-page html.

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Likes, tweets, re-tweets, and brand mentions that take place within the social web have been been recently proven to drive SEO performance. Are you taking advantage of this new development?

Why are these elements having more weight placed on them as of late? It seems fairly easy to figure out. Googles algorithm is predominantly based upon links – the foundation of PageRank.

And links have been more and more gamed over the last 3 years then ever before.

As spammers and the secondary link buying markets exploded, search engines realize that the most major threat to their existence is the quality and continuous improvement of their search listings and link manipulation was a threat.

Being solely based on links and on-page factors led to search results being too easily gamed. So many times I see top ranking sites for competitive searches being thin sites that are obviously engineered for nothing but affiliate revenue. The Panda update helped filter a lot of this, but it still exists.

Enter the world of the social web where content and information is interconnected with human relationships. On the social web, friends and connections rarely pass worthless content – but rather share information that is emotional, valuable and corresponds with what is going on in their lives.

If you didn’t know, Google pays Twitter for their data. By utilizing twitter feeds in conjunction with their link-based algorithm, their search results are able to be more relevant, more real-time.

By providing better information to searchers, engines enhance their relevance and continue to improve their competitive advantage.

So to you as a marketer, what do you do?

Well first, evaluate your landscape. Isolate the influencers within Twitter and Facebook within your category. Locate the discussion groups that are established and start participating within conversations. Use Quova and Yahoo Answers and establish yourself as a resource. Answer user questions with great content.

Utilize and review the taxonomy of your website. If you are a retailer, think of the questions that users ask about your items. Do you have content that answers these questions? Its as easy as a blog post or a product review or even an embedded video that can be hosted at YouTube or your site.

Just get involved but be sure to NOT be a salesman in your communications. Dont even try to optimize anchor text – the key is getting the views of the URL, not the semantics of any link text that may be included.

As your content gets read and shared, Google will notice. They will be able to hear the authority of your domain as opposed to the competition as users pass content along the social graph.

The advent of Google+ will undoubtedly play a role within this shift as well. When considering your strategy and your content seeding locations – be sure to engage with this upcoming social network as well.

Join Mani Karthik on FacebookSEO’s shift to social was posted at DailyBloggr.com by Mani Karthik.

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Related posts:

1. Google sitelinks – Shouldn’t webmaster’s decide it ?
2. Link Building with Social Media – A new way to source links
3. 5 Reasons Why Google Social Search would be a Nuisance

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