Jan 31, 2011

How to Use Twitter and Facebook to Boost Your Search Engine Optimization


The rise of social media in the past 5 years is something that no one really could have predicted at the beginning of the internet age, but as sites like Facebook and Twitter have become more popular, more and more web content flows through them in the form of links.
Previously, top search engines, including Google, didn’t include links shared on social networking sites when calculating a website’s search engine ranking; however, that has changed recently. Both Google and Bing admitted back in December that they now crawl public Twitter and Facebook feeds for links that contribute to search engine ranking.
What this means for you
If you own a website, or are a small business owner, and if you previously ignored social media as a legitimate way to market your business, you may find yourself behind the game now. In other words, if you haven’t yet created and implemented a social media strategy, now is the best time to start.
In a recent interview at Search Engine Land, both Google and Bing laid out some important aspects of the way that their search engines use social media to calculate the importance of links.
It’s all about the links
On the internet, it’s important to get links to your website or your content as much as possible. The more links you have on other people’s websites, blogs, etc., the higher you are going to rank in the search results because Google equates your link popularity with your “real” popularity and will push you higher in the search rank. So, the more you can get people on social networking sites to post links to you the better off you’ll be.
It’s not all about the links
Link building is great, but both Google and Bing admit that authority and variety play a role in how links to your material affect your search engine ranking. For example, if you share a link on Twitter, and it is shared by 1 follower 50 times, that’s great. But if you share a link on Twitter, and it is shared once by 50 different people, that’s even better.
Likewise, the more authority or popularity a person has increases the value of the links they share. For example, a link to your content tweeted by your best friend (100 followers) isn’t going to count as much a link to your content tweeted by Ashton Kutcher. So although you need to get your links shared on social networks, you also need to concentrate on getting your content shared by people who have a lot of followers.
All in all, your SEO strategy isn’t going to change much after this revelation, it just means you need to start concentrating on areas that may have previously not been that important to your SEO strategy.


For Further Reading,
facebook, How to, twitter

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