Last Friday I attended a webinar given by Mike Volpe at Hubspot. He was talking about Social Media and mentioned that Search Engines are now giving weight to “social signals” and that ‘Likes’ and ‘Tweet This’ were becoming the new Inbound Links . . . if we had been in an auditorium I think you would have been able to hear a pin drop! However we were all listening online and following the hashtag on Twitter, so instead the Twitter stream was suddenly crowded with people reacting.
This was new information for a lot of us, and some felt it was potentially a huge game changer.
Those familiar with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) will know that Inbound Links are given sustantial weight by Google’s algorithm when determining where to rank your site in the page results. The more high-quality inbound links you have, the better. In fact, research conducted by SEOmoz showed that 22% of the top 70 SEO experts felt that the Link Popularity of a webpage was the most important factor in SEO, putting it higher than actual page content.
If ‘Likes’ and ‘Tweet This’ are to become as important as Inbound Links, well then, does that mean ‘Followers’, ‘Fans’ and ‘Friends’ will become as important as unique website visitors? and if so, to quote Apple . . . “this changes everything”. . . or does it?
We already put a lot of our energies into Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, our blogs, our company websites etc. All the time crafting new (hopefully valuable) content for our customers, engaging with them through their preferred channels and trying to attract them to our business. These efforts, if successful, will result in Links, Likes, Tweets, Followers, Fans and Friends.
I decided to do a little routing around on the internet after the webinar and found a posting on the SEOmoz members blog on 3rd November 2010 entitled Why Facebook Likes Are Not Replacing Links Anytime Soon. So it seems not everyone is in agreement, and perhaps the jury is still out on whether Social Media signals are to definitively become a part of SEO or not.
So, what do we do?
Probably err on the side of caution and assume that Search Engines are listening to social signals. So assuming that . . . do we change anything that we are doing for our SEO strategy?
Probably not.
It’s nice to know that Google and other Search Engines may start giving weight to social signals, but if we are already following the Social Media strategy we know we should be … create, engage, listen, nurture, convert … then we probably won’t need to change anything, just continue to create and listen to our customers.
If we are attracting Links and Social Media attention, then the rankings will follow.
EnetSpark provide a complete solution of website development, website design, website promotion (SEO), website
EnetSpark provide a complete solution of website development, website design, website promotion (SEO), website maintenance and website