The Importance of Social Media for SEO

Is Social Media Important for a websites Google Ranking?

“Your business needs Social Media!” We’ve all heard this before, but it is really such a vital part of a website or even for search engine optimization? This post will answer the big question: ‘Is Social Media really worth it?’

Well the answer is No.. and yes. In reality, this is quite a huge question, so let’s go at it one question at a time.

Firstly ‘Does Social media help my SEO?’ - The answer to this is yes of course, but not by much. There are three factors that Google uses with social, these are: Popularity, Activity and Information. Making Google ask three questions of any social profile ‘Is this person active regularly? Does this person have many followers? Is the information they provide useful?’. With that in mind, social media does help SEO. So why does it not have a stronger influence on SEO? Because it’s just too easy to manipulate. As with most of Google’s problems, off-short companies are willing to send 1,000 people to like your Facebook profile, share your content or maybe leave a polite (and badly wrote) comment on your wall with no questions asked. Now ask yourself, do you really want social media to have more impact knowing this? Fortunately, social media only impacts a websites overall website ranking by 7%. This figure could make a break a business, so it’s best to be with social media, but don’t waste too much time on it.

‘Are they’re any good points to Social Media then?’ Well of course! Just not for really for Affordable SEO purposes and only in very specific websites per industry. For example, LinkedIn is a very ‘professional’ network which I’ve met countless businesses and partners through, where as, a website like Facebook is more for meeting old friends from High School or to find out who just had a sandwich for lunch. Twitter is a ‘Jack of all trades’ as it’s not taken seriously by most businesses, nor it really used by friends to communicate. From a business point of view, we are told that is seen as ‘essential’ but I’m not entirely sure why. The other networks include Pinterest, Blogger, Yahoo etc, but ending on a positive note, by far the only Social Media worthwhile (from my perspective) is Google+, this is important for that brilliant rel=”author” code which displays a pretty little picture next to all search engine results to do with your website, take a look at the footer of this website for an example on how to do it! Remember that for SEO Services London, Link Spider is your SEO of choice!