How Social Media Sites Help with SEO

Both Google and Bing are now using Social Media sites to augment their SEO search results. The theory is quite simple, if the Social Media sites have lots of quality Tweets and Likes for a “topic” then the source of the topic must be more relevant than other sites.

This is born out the situations where social media users in the Twittersphere and Facebook start communicating events which are unfurling in real time, but the search engines have this information missing in their indexes.

Topics which are trending in Twitter, can sometimes take time to appear in Google (when news agencies may pick them up). Google has attempted to integrate Twitter feeds into the SERPS and this kind of works for more important trends. Google is also trialling an integration of Tweets from your own Twitter friends.

Google still has the situation where the volume and quality of trending topics from the social media sites tell us that the topic is both current, relevant and important. Re-tweets and lots of Facebook Likes tend to point to the originator or original source of the topic.

Google now reports both Shared By counts picking up highly shared topics (from the general Facebook community) and Recent Updates, picking up highly tweeted topics. Bing is slightly different. Bing picks up Shared Counts of your own Facebook friends. Personal recommendations are obviously much more powerful than generic social signals.

Twitter and Facebook are the largest source of these social signals, but there are other sources which are highly effective too. These second tier Social Media sites include:-

• LinkedIn
• Digg
• Reddit
• StumbleUpon
• Delicious

Authority and Trust from Social Media Signals

The Authority and Link Weighting from the Social Media sites takes into consideration a number of metrics. On Facebook authority is indicated by number of friends. From Facebook pages this may be shown by the number of Page LIKES. With Twitter, Authority is shown by the number of followers and relationship of followers to following.

Other Trust and Authority factors include:-

• The age of the social media  account. Has the account just sprung up or has the account been tweeting/facebooking for a long period of time? Older active accounts with large contributions are going to be ranked with more authority than newbies.
• The level of engagement is an important metric. Active accounts where the holder provides a large number of contributions are going to be ranked with more authority than the occasional poster.
• Connection with an Authority website. Think Matt Cutts
• Regulatory of posting. As with all things Google, natural patterns are preferred. Regular contributions are much more likely to be trusted than situations where spikes occur.

There is no doubt that these relationships between Google/Bing and Facebook/Twitter are only going to get stronger. The current implementations and trials demonstrate how important a Social Media policy is for corporate, brands, SMEs, LBOs and in fact anone hoping to compete in the organic SERPS.