Google adds Social Media Data to Search Rankings

Most SEO's know this bit of information already... but for the rest of you, Google uses social media data in its search engine rankings. The question is WHAT TYPE OF DATA? For any corporation or small company it is ESSENTIAL that you add social media to your marketing strategy.

Why? Precisely because Google uses these social media feeds in its SERPs. Google is constantly changing the way it evaluates social media. Most social media spam is filtered out. They use Twitter & Facebook quality links in ranking = normal useful  links.They also try to find the "reputation" of the author and only the social media profiles that can be crawled and that are public are taken into account. So if your promoting your business via social media, do not change your profile to "private". Trending items or "social buzz" are used as a quality signal. So if your "tweet" makes it in the Google real times results, your doing great! Getting reciprocal followers or adding lots of followers do not help much so dont go overboard and add everyone on the planet.

Social media links can help you speed up your website’s indexing and they are taken into account by search engines such as Google. In short, Google evaluates the quality of the post and the authority of the author. With Facebook, the shared links from Fan pages are treated similarly to Twitter links. No links from personal walls are used in rankings. Social media has become more important in the contribution of search engine rankings and it is crucial that you use it appropriately.

Drive Your Traffic Home with Content

My best advice for new website owners: Just write!

It doesn’t matter how much content. Just write good, quality, sticky content each day. Whether it’s a short paragraph or a 500 word article. Content is king, especially when first starting out. Don’t get overwhelmed by all the SEO tricks and page optimization guidelines. Just write. New, fresh content increases search engine rankings (SERPs) and traffic as well as getting quality links from other sites. If there’s not enough relevant content for your brand or business, it pretty much defeats the purpose of having a website in the first place.

Utilizing a Blogger(s) to Spread the Company Brand

A quick example. A friends company found a popular blogger who had spoken highly of the company's brand. Just prior to launching a new product, the company sent the blogger a free sample, inviting him to review it with "no strings attached."

The end result: The blogger wrote a favorable review and generated a flood of comments. So the company got nearly free publicity and feedback. This blogger is a very popular blogger on a very popular blog with thousands of followers as well as content that is syndicated. Product sales surged 35% right after the article/review was written. The traffic to the company's website from the blog tripled (as tracked by google analytics data). Welcome to Marketing Web 2.0.

Getting Links To Your Site

• Reciprocal links. These links are obtained by contacting other website owners and trading links with them. Google and other search engines give very little value to these types of links anymore, particularly if your links are to and from an unrelated site.
• Directory submissions. There are thousands of niche and general interest directories on the internet that will allow you to submit a link to your website. Some are free and some are not. As with reciprocal links, the closer the directory is related to your site's topic, the better.
• Article submissions are another fairly simple way of obtaining non-reciprocal links to your site. Simply write (or hire someone to write) a good article and submit it for free to one of the top article directories on the web, such as ezinearticles.com or goarticles.com.
• Write valuable quality content that other site owners will want to link to on their own.
• Competitive Intelligence – Analyze the back links of your competitors. Try to get links from the same sites.
• Submit to Verticals/Topical Guides (local libraries, local chamber of commerce)
• Use Blogs and RSS – Google loves blogs
• Create Podcasts or just put up plain old Screenshots – Bloggers love posting them