How Social Media Now Directly Influences Search

Earlier this year Google announced that they were now taking social media signals into consideration in their ranking algorithm, so now the ‘number of Tweets’ will play a part in how your website is ranked on Google. There is also a correlation between Facebook likes and high rankings although Google doesn’t directly use this data.

Social media signals are now also incorporated into Google’s personalised search results. If you are following your favourite fashion website on Twitter then when you search for fashion you will find that website will come up higher in your search results. This is because Google assumes that as you are following that website on a social media level that it is more relevant to you than other fashion websites.

This is extremely significant because before companies with big social media followings were just communicating information, offers, products and discounts to customers where as now they have the opportunity to directly influence and change search engine results through their social media strategy.

High rankings on Google for search terms can still be achieved through traditional means, but as always the online marketing landscape is evolving, so where in the past social media was a additional add on to your online marketing strategy it is now a necessity for search engine optimisation (SEO) success.

With all this in mind here are a few tips of things you can do to keep competitive online.

1. If your business is not already then you must get social networking accounts setup for them and integrated into your website so that people can Like, Tweet, +1 or Share your products and blog posts
2. Use a service like Open Site Explorer to keep track of the number of Facebook Shares, likes, Google +1’s and Tweets for your site
3. Make sure you include your targeted keywords in your Tweets and hashtags
4. Setup Facebook Insights tracking on your website
5. When you write a new blog post, submit it to social websites such as Twitter, Facebook and Google+1, this will not only drive traffic to your website but also help with getting new content indexed extremely quickly by Google. Using a service like Twitter Feed you can automate this process.