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Social Media and the Joined up SEO Approach

Such is the volume of content being created online that Google now regularly trawls Twitter to find influential content to index and rank, sorting the wheat from the chaff and saving it time as it wades through the ever increasing volumes of content being uploaded to the internet on a daily basis. The architecture of social media networks is geared towards visibility and genuine peer approval and as such is hard to fake convincingly. It may well be possible to ‘buy likes’ on platforms like Facebook but it’s not hard for the search engines to see through this tactic and others like it.

With this wisdom of crowds approach, Google and other search engines have long been tapping into social signals to denote value to any given link or webpage. Whilst social media buzz has in no way replaced links in terms of importance, as more and more content gets created online and distributed on social media, this scrutiny is likely to increase further. If your content has a strong social media presence then this will boost not only your website’s position in the SERPs but likely increase the number of websites that link to you as well. In essence this is like a feedback loop: to do well in SEO nowadays it helps a lot to do well on social media as well.

By placing more power in the hands of the masses and – in Google’s eyes, at least – taking it away from unscrupulous blackhat SEOs, the rulebook is slowly being rewritten. Hootsuite’s Kristina Cisnero explains how Google’s focus on content has enabled a coming together of SEO and social media marketing strategies.