The Importance Of Social Media Being A Part Of SEO

Social Media has been growing at unprecidented rates online over the past 5-6 years. We have seen the likes of Facebook and LinkedIn grow rapidly and the flow of information posted on them increase as well as peoples dependance on the social media platform.

Usually when something like social media takes off online there is a flow on effect to other websites and more specifically the search engines. A lot of people are not aware of how SEO really works. In the most basic terms search engines are trying to organise the way websites on the internet is catalogued and found.

How does this cataloging relate to search engines and indexing? Well there is a few basic factors like relevance, keyword density, keyword phrasing and pairing which help form the basic confindes of searching any database. Search engines are like a massive database filled with websites, their addresses and brief intro’s for each page indexed in the database.

When you search for a particular product or service you are essentially browsing for a particular brand, type of product or a solution to a problem and to do this you are using keywords, phrases etc. The only problem is that because there are so many websites it means there is so many options. To help work out relevance and importance of each page search engines have complex algorythms which are used to provide search results.

In recent times there have been some massive changes to the way search engines like Google index and rate each persons website. It is said that search engines now weigh on things like Social Media (shares, likes, posts, tweets etc), Longer tailed keyword phrases and much more. While these things are not the be all and end all they are important enough to be mentioned by the likes of Matt Cutts from Google.

So where does this leave those businesses who have websites but operate without Social Media as an advertising platform? Well it is a double headed answer… You can be hindering your ability to approach a wider marketplace geographically by not having one but at the same time you could also be doing yourself website a favour.

The reason why you could be hindering your ability is because you are not utilising the “potential” viral nature of a post on social media networks. This of course means your business or brand may not be getting the well deserved exposure.

The positive as to why you could be doing yourself a favour is because you either do not have the time or you do not have the budget to have your social media pages updated regularly enough. Not updating the pages enough can mean that your followers will stop following you or more importantly any post you make may not make it to their news feeds.

Neither of these reasons really are going to affect your business or brands ability to take off as the power of people sharing and posting on various social media platforms is what really matters. If you provide people with the ability to share and post links to products or services on your website it will have more of a positive effect.

If you have been wondering how you should approach social media. All we can say is embrace it and give your site visitors all the opportunities possible to be able to share the page, post a link to it on their social media sites etc. It could make a massive difference to your websites profitability.