Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a rapidly growing industry, due to the fact that more and more businesses are realizing the importance of having an online presence. Part of this online presence includes integrating with the various social media platforms and networks available. The importance of both SEO and social media cannot be understated and are definitely not mutually exclusive, as social media actually has a large influence on SEO.
Impact of Social Sharing on SEO
One of the biggest ways that social media influences the SEO industry is through social sharing. SEO is all about improving your website’s visibility and rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs). While it remains clear that links are the primary ranking factor, it appears that social shares are becoming increasingly important.
Extra “Link Juice”
Social sharing can turn a good backlink into a great one. This is because social sharing provides more SEO value. For instance, if you write a really good guest blog post that includes a link back to your site, that link provides some SEO value (typically referred to as “link juice”) for your site. However, if the post is good and starts to garner some social shares, it will gain even more SEO value. Each time someone tweets or shares that post on Twitter, Facebook or Google+, it becomes a bit more valuable in regards to “link juice.”
Drives Organic Traffic
Not only can social sharing provide more link juice, but it also increases the exposure of your content, which can drive more traffic to your site. This traffic will be organic, targeted traffic because, typically, the person sharing it is doing so because they are interested in the content. Also, due to the nature of social media, they would be sharing this content with their “friends” or “followers” who tend to be like-minded.
While the number and quality of backlinks continues to be the main criteria for SERP rankings, social sharing is quickly becoming very significant as well. Along with factoring into rankings, social shares are responsible for driving highly valuable organic traffic to a website. Social media, along with SEO are important aspects of a company’s online presence, and there is both a definite distinction and crossover between the two.
About the Author: Andrew Dennis is a writer at the white-hat link building company Page One Power based in Boise, ID. When he’s not writing about the role social media plays in regards to SEO, he is perfecting his short game (which needs a lot of perfecting) on the golf course.
