What exactly does social media have to relate to SEO? At MWI, we get lots of questions from our the current and potential clients. While social media has been an increasing marketing channel in recent years, the majority of businesses have yet to make use of the potential of it. This is crucial for companies that are investing in search engine optimization. While the benefits of using social media may not seem immediately apparent, they are crucial to SEO support. Of the many reasons to think about social media as part of your overall strategy to be online, here are 5 advantages of it to SEO.

1.) Social Media Signals
It's no secret that Google, Bing and other major search engines have been using online dialogue in their ranking algorithms for quite some period of time. If people tweet, share, like, comment or share a piece of content, this is called a social engagement. The more social engagements your content receives, the more social signals you can build for your site. Search engines look at these signals from social media, and consider it an element of quality when evaluating content. This is a way for search engines to identify what people find most useful and also what they consider to be as high-quality. The content you've created can be quickly indexed in the event that it's receiving lots of social interactions.

2.) Link Building
It's been a long time that you could make a request for Socialwb.com hyperlinks from other sites. With the advent of Google's Panda and Penguin algorithms SEOs must perform link building in the traditional way - create high quality content that is linked-worthy. How can you get your content to websites who are willing to link to your site, if you ask them directly, which would be considered "unnatural"? Social media can help. Social media lets you post your content and share it with people who are willing to link to it, when it's worthy of linking to. People who share your content with their friends, further increasing the influence of your content.

3) Content amplification
You can create all the good-quality content that you wish to, but it won't gain significant traction without the aid of amplification. Sure, email marketing can be a great way to amplify content, but it will only reach those in your marketing database. The possibility of reaching new audiences is through social media. If you post your content to your followers, they will share it with their own followers if they find it helpful. These people will then be able to share it with their followers and increase your reach. As a result, you get many relevant visitors, inbound links, branding awareness and social signals All of these are utilized by search engines in determining the quality of your content.

content amplification lifecycle

4) Brand Recognition and Signals
The brand's identity and reputation can tell search engines an awful lot about the overall quality of your site's content and how much it should be respected in their ranking algorithms. Social media helps to build brand awareness and amplifies the content you publish. Google calls this co-citation. Building these co-citations using social media can help increase Google's trust in your website as well as helping with branded search queries.

5) Social Indexing
Search engines have been indexing social media profiles for a few years now so they can now show up in the search results pages. This allows your business to show up in search results for branded queries that are not exclusive to your site. It's more than that. Tweets that were individual from Twitter were once indexable and included in search results. This allowed your site to be ranked higher in searches. The service was temporary for a couple of months before Google took the decision to end 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.