What do social media have to in relation to SEO? At MWI, we get these questions frequently from our the current and potential clients. While social media has become a growing channel for marketing in recent times, many companies have not yet started to benefit from the potential of it. This is especially important for companies that are investing in SEO. Setting up and managing social media accounts is crucial to support SEO efforts, though their benefits aren't immediately apparent. Of the many reasons why you should consider social media as a part of your overall strategy to be online There are five main reasons it's important for SEO.

1) Social Media Signals
It's not a secret that Google, Bing, and other search engines rely on online conversations in their ranking algorithms. A social engagement is the time when people share, like, comment on, share or tweet about an article. A piece of content that has the highest number of social engagements will be able to show more social signals. Search engines measure these social signals and then use them as an index of quality when ranking content. It's a method of determining what content is popular with users over what their algorithm decides is good quality. If something has a high amount of social engagement the content can be identified.

2.) Link Building
It's long gone of going out and asking for websites to link to your site. Google's Panda/Penguin algorithm has forced SEOs to linkbuild using the old method: make top-quality content that's relevant. How do you reach websites that will link to your content, if you ask them directly, which would be thought to be "unnatural"? Social media is the way to go. Social media allows you to place your content in front of the right people, Minecrafting.co.uk/wiki/index.php/User:KathleneFults (Www.Creativebee.com) who could be convinced to link to it in the event that it is worthy of linking to. Those people will also connect your content to their network which increases the power of your content.

3) Content amplification
It doesn't matter how high-quality the content you publish, it won't gain traction without amplification. Marketing via email is a great way of amplifying content but it's only going to be able to reach the people on your marketing list. Social media allows you to increase the reach of your content. Once you share your content, your following will also connect with their friends if they find it useful. These people will then be able to share your content with their followers, increasing your reach. You'll also get relevant traffic and inbound links social signals, as well as brand awareness All of which are used by search engines for content quality determination.

content amplification lifecycle

4) Brand Awareness and Signals
Search engines can use brand reputation and image to assess the credibility of your website and how trustworthy it needs to be within their ranking algorithms. In addition to boosting your content social media can also help build brand awareness. Google refers to this as co-citation. Building these co-citations using social media will help improve Google's trust and confidence in your site, as well as aiding by using branded search terms.

5.) Social Indexing
Since search engines index social media profiles and display them up in search results pages. This allows your business to be displayed in search results for search queries that are branded and not limited to your company website. However, it's even more than that. Individual tweets on Twitter were at one time indexed and displayed in search results as well providing another method for your website to be ranked in search. It was only for a short time, however it was a short-term solution, and Google stopped it after a few months. Google will once again show tweets in search results, so it's important to leverage it for getting your content ranked.