What does social media have to relate to SEO? At MWI, we get these questions frequently from our customers who are currently or are considering becoming clients. Social media is rapidly expanding marketing channel that many businesses have only recently begun taking advantage of in the last few years, but it's very important to leverage - especially if you're investing funds into search engine optimization. The creation and management of social media accounts are important to assist in SEO efforts, although the benefits may not be immediately evident. Here are five reasons why social media is vital to SEO.

1) Social Media Signals
It's not a secret that Google, Bing and other major search engines have been using online chat as part of their algorithm for ranking for quite some period of time. When people tweet, like, comment or share an article that is known as a social engagement. The more social engagements a piece of content gets, the greater social signals it will bring to your website. Search engines analyze the social signals they receive, Www.sherpapedia.org/index.php?title=User:AaronOswald and then use them as an indicator of quality when ranking content. It's a way to measure what content is popular with users in comparison to what their algorithm decides is good quality. Content can be quickly indexed if it's receiving a lot of engagement on social media.

2) Link Building
Long gone are the days of asking for websites to link to yours. Google's Panda/Penguin algorithms are forcing SEOs to build links in the old-fashioned way: write quality content that is relevant. How do you reach websites who are willing to link to your site, if they are considered "unnatural"? Social media can help. Social media enables you to present your content in front of people who are interested and could be influenced to link to it when it's 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 good your content is, it won't achieve much success without amplification. Sure, email marketing can be a great way to amplify content, but it will only reach the people in your database of marketing. You can reach new audiences via social media. If you post your content to your followers, they will spread it to their own followers If they are satisfied with the content. These people will then be able to share your content with their followers, which will increase your reach. In return, you gain an abundance of relevant traffic including inbound links, social signals , and brand awareness All of which are used by search engines to judge content quality.

content amplification lifecycle

4) Brand Awareness and Signals
The brand's identity and reputation can inform search engines an awful lot about the overall quality of your website and the extent to which it can be respected in their ranking algorithms. In addition to boosting your content social media can also help to increase awareness of your brand. Google calls this co-citation. Building these co-citations using social media can improve the trust Google has in your web page and also assist with search queries that are personalized.

5.) Social Indexing
Since the search engines are able to index social media sites and display them up in search results pages. This enables your brand to appear on search results when you type in branded search queries that are not limited to only your website. This is even better. Individual Tweets from Twitter were at one time indexed and displayed in search results, too giving another opportunity for your content to rank in search. It was only for a short time, however it ended and Google shut it down after few months. Google will once again show tweets in search results, so it's important to leverage it for getting your content ranked.