Why Is Social Media Important To SEO?

Long story short: Because search engines cannot afford to ignore it. With Google in particular, long before they launched Google+ they spent a lot of time figuring out how to rank facebook within their search results.

This wasn’t something they took lightly and with good reason. We don’t need to give you figures, we all know how massive a part of our daily lives social media has become and yet some people still seem to have trouble understanding why this matters when it comes time to perform SEO.

With regards to trying to get your own website to rank facebook isn’t incredibly important, but it would likely be a safe bet that having a broader online presence (and the ability to build natural links via facebook to your website) would help. However Google+ is where it’s really at if you want to take full advantage of what’s possible with Google. And let’s face it who doesn’t!

Google+ could best be described as the nervous system of your Google presence. Over the past year or two Google has integrated the last parts of its services into your “Google Account” which now encompasses everything from maps, YouTube, Google Drive (the service formerly known as Google Docs), Webmaster Tools, Analytics and GMail through to your Google+ profile, business pages and Google+ local listings. Then there are unique features such as authoring, which allows you to regularly remind Google of your presence via content and as a bonus results in profile pictures showing up next to your organic rankings. This is a great way to stand out from the crowd in search results.

You can now also have “+1” buttons embedded in your website so you can expect that Google will start to interact with your site in much deeper and more meaningful ways as time goes on.

If you’re asking yourself why this is, the answer is simple: We are in the midst of a shift from the robotic (“enter keywords here and hope for relevant results”), to a much more intuitive version of search where you can simply ask a question, see what your friends like, or access a broad range of content on what you’re looking for to get a better idea of what the organisation or website clamoring for your attention is really all about.

It might seem complicated, but I’m willing to bet that one day in the not too distant future you will look back and laugh about how you’ve searched until now.

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