Heard about social signals?
Whats all this about then? Basically, traditional SEO was all about creating backlinks, as the backlink was classed as a VOTE for your site by that other website, or more importantly that website owner was voting for your site as they found your stuff and found it useful.
Today, having backlinks is still great, however, Google and Bing do not believe that a site can have thousands of backlinks with no social signals. Here’s a recent press release I found on Google news about social signals.
Both Google and Bing have incorporated social features over the past year in their search results pages displayed to every internet user looking up information on the web. Social signals are deemed measures of how relevant a webpage is and how trusted a brand name projected by a dedicated website is perceived by the internet audience. These social signals can be mined or picked up from social media platforms and profiles, precisely why marketers have jumped to solidify their brand’s presence and credibility in the social media landscape, hoping to influence and “get shared” or “tweeted” by their followers and friends on social networks.
Traffic or website visitors coming from social media networks and other platforms, among other factors, are some of the social media signals search engines look into when ranking websites prompting businesses to re-evaluate their social marketing goals and objectives to include strengthening their social profiles and communities inside those profiles….More at Buy Real Marketing Scales Up As Social Signals Become Huge Marketing Factor – Virtual-Strategy Magazine
More Reading
In essence what does all this mean? Cut to the chase Brian – you need you website content, photo’s, videos, articles and press releases read by other people but more importantly they then need to share it on their blogs, forums etc. However, they also need to share the content on their social profiles like:
- Facebook, my personal profile is http://fb.com/bparnall
- Linked In
- Youtube
- AND OF COURSE Google Plus
- There are many many more, like the up coming and very popular Pinterest