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SEO and Social Media

Once thought to be only a passing medium, social media has shown itself to be a lasting phenomenon and continues to become more ingrained in our everyday online experience. One can hardly leave a comment on a news article, enter a contest on a blog, or visit a web page without having to login or be directed to many of the most popular social networking sites. With its increasing pervasiveness in our online lives, social media is now a necessity to promote traffic to ones website and is a crucial tool in todays world of search engine optimization (SEO).

In order to use social media as a tool towards SEO, one must understand how social media integration actually impacts search results. While quality content with the right keywords and other linked sites still play a major part in how a site ranks when it comes to search engine results, social media must now be incorporated as well to remain competitive. Search engines such as Google, measure the “social signals” or how often social media is used via a website. These “signals” include things like the site owner sharing content using various social channels and in reverse, how often a site is visited via a social channel. Fans or followers also play a role along with how many social media links are available on a page. This is essentially the new measure of link building. So now that we know that social media integration is necessary for the success of a website, what’s next?

The uniting of social media with a webpage provides a complete experience for the internet user. The webpage provides a static center point with the guarantee of providing important information about the company the site is promoting. Social media serves a different purpose, it is a window into the company and a direct connection for the user. Social media also allows the user to generate traffic to a webpage by sharing the content on their own social networking pages, exposing the webpage to all their online “friends”. By adding social media links to one’s webpage and providing interesting and shareable content, web traffic will rise along with search engine ranking. This is the kind of word of mouth kind exposure every business is looking for!

Our online world is forever changing and staying ahead of the curve is the key to success when it comes to SEO. In order to do this in our online world today, one must be thinking about how to incorporate social media into their sites. Not only will this work to increase a page’s visibility and page rank but it will make it easier for interested parties to find your content.

On a special note we are urging our clients to sign up for for Google’s social network and share every chance they get.  Nobody really gets Google+ and most people just plain don’t like it but unfortunately it is owned by the search god Google and they plan to force it down our throats.