What do social media have to relate to SEO? At MWI we hear this a lot from the current and potential clients. Social media is rapidly growing channel for marketing that most businesses have only recently begun taking advantage of in the last few years. However, it's crucial to make use of - especially if you're investing funds into search engine optimization. While the advantages of social media may not seem immediately apparent, they're crucial to SEO aid. Here are five reasons 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 dialogue as part of their algorithm for ranking for a long time now. If people tweet, share, like or comment on the content they like that is known as a social engagement. The more social interactions a piece of content gets, the greater social signals you send to your website. Search engines analyze these social signals and use it as an element of quality when evaluating the content. This is a way for search engines to know what people find most useful and what their algorithm deems top-quality. If an article receives lots of social interaction it will be immediately indexable.

2.) Link Building
There are no more days of soliciting websites to add links to yours. With the advent of Google's Panda and Penguin algorithm, SEOs are forced to create links in the old fashioned way by creating high-quality content which is relevant to linking. How do you reach websites that are willing to link to your website, even if you ask them directly, which would be considered "unnatural"? Social media is your solution. Social media allows you to place your content in front of relevant groups of people who may be convinced to link to it in the event that it is worthy of linking to. They will also promote your content to others increasing your influence.

3) Content Amplification
It doesn't matter how good your content is, it's unlikely to achieve much success until you amplify it. Marketing via email is an excellent method of amplifying the content you create, but it won't reach people in your list of marketing contacts. Social media allows you to reach new audiences with your content. If you share your content, the people who follow you will connect with their friends if they find it useful. They will then also share it with their friends which will increase the reach of your content. Additionally, you will gain relevant traffic, inbound linking as well as social signals and brand awareness All of which can be utilized by search engines to determine content assessment of quality.

content amplification lifecycle

4.) Brand Awareness & Signals
Search engines can use brand name and reputation to determine the quality of your site and how trustworthy it must be when they rank it in their algorithms. In addition to boosting your content, social media also helps build brand awareness. This is what Google calls a co-citation. These co-citations can be developed through social media to improve Google's trust and help with the search engine's branded searches.

5.) Social Indexing
Search engines have been indexing social media accounts for a number of years now, which means they now show up in the search results pages. This enables your brand to show up in search results that include branded search queries on more than just your own website. This gets better. Individual Tweets from Twitter were initially indexed and included in search results too giving another opportunity for socialwb.com your website to be ranked in search. That was only temporary for a few months before Google made the decision to stop the service, and it's still in place. Google will once again show tweets in search results, so it's important to leverage it for getting your content ranked.