Social media is essential to SEO

May 11, 2012 - PRLog -- Various studies have been conducted in an attempt to prove that Google is indeed using social signals to affect rankings, factoring signals such as Tweets, Facebook Likes and LinkedIn Shares into an algorithm that has for a long time been focussed heavily around the number of inbound links to a page.

Branded3, a UK based Digital and SEO agency, recently carried out the world’s largest, most comprehensive study on the effect of Twitter Tweets v Rankings. They found that Google give’s a boost to SERPS that are Tweeted out.

The Internet Marketing Company, a Los Angeles SEO company also recently carried out their own research on ‘Do you include social media in your SEO campaign?’ All of the respondents confirmed that they did.

So why is a stronger emphasis being placed on social media signals, rather than the long sought after backlink?

Well one of the main reasons could be that links can be bought and sold, whereas social signals cannot. There are many companies offering to provide backlinks for a fee, this is known as a blackhat technique.

Google has always placed a high value on links, but only naturally obtained links. It is starting to devalue paid for links, but it will never devalue ‘natural’ links.

Google understands that people will only ever link to high quality content. This makes social signals unique, it is showing Google that linkers are placing a high value on the content that they link to, and therefore Google should also.

While Google will still place a strong emphasis on links, it is clear to see that the predictions at the turn of the year were correct, and searching habits will lean more towards social channels as people trust recommendations and value the opinion of those they know.

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