Are social signals good for SEO?
You already might know the value that any high ranking SEO commands, but to figure out the ways on how to improve the site ranking can prove to be a learning experience.
No doubt, good links are relevant enough but one cannot ignore the relevance of social signals.
Before talking about the relevance of social signals, it is worthy to spare some efforts on understanding that, what exactly does a social signal mean?
Social Signal
Social signal means any kind or category of link from any of the social media sites to your website or blog. Speaking in specific terms, social signals usually mean +1s on Google+ retweets for Twitter and likes for Facebook.
Whenever someone shows a liking for your content, the signal flashes from your Facebook portal to the website with the link to your site appearing on the user’s Facebook feed. This will not only appear in case the user has altered his or her privacy settings.
Social signals can not only be considered good for one’s ego but also stand to benefit one’s brand and the SEO ranking of the website.
Why Are Social Signals Considered To Be Awesome?
This is considered to be a good sign whenever anyone shares your content. Some of the worthy reasons as to why social signals are relevant can be listed as
Exposure Increase
It can be considered as worthy sign for you, if anyone beyond your professional and personal circle promotes your endeavors.
Social signals are a unique way of business promotion as they cost one nothing but make a great sense for anyone deciding to pay a visit to your site.
Provide Evidence of Engaged Customers
It is a great feeling when one gets to know that your readers have been enjoying the content so much so as to promote it through their social media means.
It is a common perception that consumer who actively share the content promoted by you has genuine interest in the brand as they have been using their personal account to promote your website on their personal social network account, be it Facebook or Twitter.
Quality Indicator
Social signals are a great quality indicator. It might happen that some of your written content receives more likes and retweets than others.
This has a clear meaning that the content has come up to the liking of the readers. Thus quality indication becomes a reality with social signals.
Moreover, social signals act as a tool for free market research as they highlight the content which most of your readers prefer.
Increased Revenue and Traffic
This can be considered as an indirect benefit of social signals but it leads to greater brand reputation, giving one the opportunity of having more new customers and increased sales over a period of time.
Social Signals Do Influence Your SEO
The topic that if social signals influence the SEO is though debatable but one point is amply clear. Social signals do have a bearing on your blog. This is because of one reason that social signals do help build credibility.
Social signals act as an indicator point for new visitors as to how many people have already gone through the content or liked it.
Additionally, this also offers an insight into the fact that how many of those found the content worthy enough of sharing through Twitter. This helps build credibility among the viewers and they take one with serious earnest.
Apart from this, a second relatively distinct category of audience is also keeping a tab on you. These are various search engines and Google is the leader among them.
Various studies done so far have indicated that search engines as Google and Bing have given due consideration to social signals when it comes to rank the search engine. The reference of Google can be particularly highlighted in this reference.
Google is known to shower praises and rewards on sites that have a worthy number of social signals from readers.
Though most search engines will tell you on how many people have liked the Facebook page or have included you in their Google+ circles, but only Google can tell you if how many people have been able to share your content or the individual post.
Improving Your Social Signal Status
To get most of the benefit of the social signals, the business profile must be created on popular social networking sites as Facebook and Twitter. The social buttons should be added to the content so that the same can be shared with ease.
Take benefits of social signals by adopting the means highlighted above and go much beyond just having some good links for promoting your endeavour.
This Post is written by Alia. She is a writer/blogger. She writes articles on Technology, social media, wordpress, Gamification, responsive design and software development etc. These days she contributes on Devrover.com
Hmmm. That’s why I’d like to increase my social signal this year…
There are more than 100 “search engine ranking factors” such as URL length, Word count, html length, Google+, FB likes &shares, Twitter tweets, and Pinterest shares. I personally share my articles on FB after they are indexed by Google.
Why Should Author Be an Authority Signal? It shouldn’t necessarily. But “IF” social sharing better reflects the popularity and worth of content on the web, then Google and Bing have a problem on their hands. Tweets and Facebook status provide little surrounding text and no anchor text. This means that both search engines cannot assign any value to the originating page and have few contextual clues about the destination page. Therefore they have to invest in working out ‘authority’ of an author as a means to generate more relevancy and context around the shared page.
I’ll definitely relate your message to Matt Cutts. Hahahahaha!
BTW: You’ve a great point in your comment. Thanks for reading Erna.
hi,
really great idea. this article is very Helpful and informative about social signals. Hopefully this will increase the traffic on my site.
Top seo advice from a top writer 😉 thanks
I understood the point of Social Signal, also the importance of Google Plus. but still I am not able to generate traffic from it. Would be great if you can share some tips for G Plus.
Google loves good likes for ever. If you tried to bulit backlinks by an fool tool Then google animals will dance on your blog
Am I right Michael Chibuzor
The problem with google is that it never stops updating its algorithm. You don’t have time to cope with something before they hit you with a new update :S
I do agree with your post. No doubt that good links are relevant enough to increase the site ranking. But today social media plays an equally important role in getting good result.
I will reading your article and I too agree with you Michael that Social signals are a source for building trust with your readers and of course some of the potential customers.
social signals are very important for websites. search engines count social signals for better ranking. Nice post thanks for sharing.
Google+ is the most important!!!
Hey very nice and informative article and will definitely go with it that yes social signals influence our SEO and I am going to use this experiment my website and i will surely share results to you and community here soon. 😉
Thanks for the sharing,
Aidric
Mr. Michael, may I ask??? What are the good links according to you??? What do you think?? Are nofollow still good links???
Yes, no-follow links are still good links, especially if they’re from authority websites like Facebook, Twitter, Digg etc.
Nice tips to generate organic traffic to any website.
thanks for sharing it!
I too agree with you Michael that Social signals are a source for building trust with your readers and of course some of the potential customers.
I totally agree with you Michael,
Social influence is always the better option to dominate the Google ranking. The bigger social following one has the more reputation one deals with.
Good to have you read my post Harman.
great article. Helpful and informative. Hopefully this will increase the traffic on my site.
I hope so too.
Sometimes people focus on the wrong things and forget that likes, shares and so forth also have relevance to google and seo. Not only that but lots more people get to see your posts and pages. So why not. And then adding a nice sharing plugin to your site can help alot. I like digg digg as it follows the reader down the page as they read, so they can share at any time!
Thanks for your comment Ashley.
Social signals are very important for for search engine rankings even Google counts social signals from major sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and also from Google+. Some tech geeks also believe that if you have setup your author profile with Google authorship then it might help to increase your search engine rankings.