What can social media have to offer SEO? At MWI we hear lots of questions from our customers who are currently or are considering becoming clients. Social media is an incredibly growing marketing channel that most businesses have only begun making use of in the past couple of years, yet it's vital to take advantage of it in particular if you're putting resources into search engine optimization. The creation and socialwb.com management of social media accounts is crucial to support SEO initiatives, but the benefits may not be immediately evident. Here are five reasons why social media is important for SEO.

1) Social Media Signals
It's not a secret that Google, Bing and other major search engines have been using online conversations in their ranking algorithms for a long time now. When people tweet, like, comment or share the content that is known as a social engagement. Content that has more social engagements will show higher social signals. Social signals are utilized by search engines to rank the content. This is a method for search engines to identify what content people consider to be most valuable and what their algorithm deems as high-quality. If an article receives a lot of engagement on social media it will be immediately classified.

2) Link Building
It's been a long moment when you could simply solicit hyperlinks from other sites. In the wake of Google's Panda and Penguin algorithm SEOs are now forced to perform link building in the traditional way - create high quality content that is link-worthy. But how do you reach websites willing to link to your site if they are not directly approached as an "unnatural" link building technique? Social media can help. Social media lets you present your content in front of relevant groups of people who may be influenced to link to it if it's worth linking to. People who share your content with their friends and increase the reach of your content.

3) The amplifying of content
No matter how top-quality the content you publish, it won't be popular until you amplify it. Yes, email marketing is an effective way to boost content, but it'll only reach people within your marketing database. Social media lets you increase the reach of your content. If you publish your content to your followers, they'll also share it with their personal followings if they find it helpful. They will also be able to share your content with their followers, which will increase your reach. You will also gain relevant traffic, inbound linking social signals, as well as brand recognition All of which are used by search engines for content quality evaluation.

content amplification lifecycle

4.) Brand Communication and Awareness
Search engines may use your brand's image and recognition to judge the quality of your site and how trustworthy it needs to be in their ranking algorithms. Social media aids in building an image for your business and also boosts the content you publish. This is what Google calls a co-citation. Building these co-citations through social media will help improve the trust Google has in your web page and also assist by using branded search terms.

5) Social Indexing
Since the search engines are able to index social media accounts, they are now showing on search results pages. This allows your brand to appear in search results for branded queries that are not only restricted to your business's website. This is even more effective. 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. However, it was only temporary it ended 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.