What do social media platforms 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 a rapidly growing channel for marketing that most businesses have only recently begun taking advantage of in the past couple of years, yet it's essential to utilize it particularly if you're investing resources into search engine optimization. While the advantages of social media might not be immediately apparent, they're crucial to SEO support. Here are five reasons why social media is essential for SEO.

1.) Social Media Signals
It's not difficult to see that Google, Bing, and other search engines rely on online conversation as part of their algorithm for ranking. A social engagement happens when people like, comment, share, or tweet on a piece of content. The more social interactions a piece of content has, the more social signals you send to your website. Social signals are utilized by search engines to determine the quality of the content. This is a way for search engines to determine the most popular content and what their algorithm deems top-quality. A piece of content could be instantly indexed in the event that it's receiving lots of social engagement.

2.) Link Building
It's past the time when you could get links from other websites. Google's Panda/Penguin algorithm has forced SEOs to build links by using the traditional method of creating good quality content that is pertinent. How do you get in touch with sites who are willing to link to your website if asking them directly is thought to be an "unnatural" practice for building links? Social media is your solution. Social media lets you share your content with people who are willing to link to it should it be worth linking to. They will also spread your content among others increasing your influence.

3) Content Amplification
You can create all the good-quality content that you wish to, but it won't gain any traction without amplifying it. Email marketing is an excellent method of amplifying content but it will only be able to reach the people on your list of marketing contacts. Social media can help you expand your reach with your content. If you send your content out to your followers, they will share it with their own followers if they find it helpful. These people will then promote your content to their followers, thereby increasing your reach. In return, you will gain an abundance of relevant traffic and inbound links, as well as brand recognition and social signals - all of which are used by search engines to determine content quality.

content amplification lifecycle

4.) Brand Awareness and Signals
The brand's identity and reputation can tell search engines an awful lot about the overall quality of your website as well as the degree to which it should be trusted in its ranking algorithms. Social media is a great way to increase brand recognition and boosts the visibility of the content you publish. Google calls this co-citation. Building these co-citations through social media can improve Google's trust and confidence in your website as well as helping with branded search queries.

5) Social Indexing
Search engines have been indexing social media accounts for a number of years now, which means they now appear in search result pages. This lets your company's brand show up in search results for brand-related queries, which aren't exclusive to your site. But there's more than that. Tweets that were individual from Twitter were once indexable and were displayed in search results. This enabled your content to be ranked higher in searches. This was just temporary for a few months before Google made the decision to stop this feature, which is still in effect. Google will once again show tweets in search results, موقع تزويد مشاهدات (sell) so it's important to leverage it for getting your content ranked.