What does social media have to do with SEO? At MWI we hear many of these inquiries from current and prospective clients. Social media is an incredibly growing channel for marketing that most companies have only started using in the last few years, however it's essential to utilize it particularly if you're investing resources in SEO. Creating and managing social media accounts are important for supporting SEO efforts, though their benefits aren't immediately evident. Here are five reasons social media is essential for SEO.

1.) Social Media Signals
It is no secret that Google, Bing, and other search engines make use of online conversations as part of their algorithm for ranking. Social engagements occur when people comment, like, share, or tweet about an article. The more social engagements a piece of content has, the more social signals you build to your website. Search engines analyze these social signals, and use it as an indicator of quality when ranking the content. It's a way of evaluating what content is popular with users over what their algorithm decides is of good quality. If the content you're looking at has a high amount of social shares it will be immediately indexable.

2) Link Building
There are no more days of asking for websites to add links to your site. Google's Panda/Penguin algorithms have compelled SEOs to link build the traditional way: create quality content that is relevant. How do you reach out to websites who are willing to link to your site, if they are thought to be "unnatural"? Social media is the solution. Social media allows you to expose your content to of people who are interested and could be convinced to link to it when it's worthy of linking to. People who be able to share your content with other people and boost your authority.

3.) Content Amplification
You can create all the top-quality content you like, but it won't gain any traction without amplifying it. Marketing via email is an effective method to increase the reach of your the content you create, but it won't be able to reach the people on your list of marketing contacts. You can reach new audiences via social media. Once you share your content, your followers will also be able to share it with their followers if they find it useful. This will allow them to promote your content to their followers, thereby increasing your reach. You will also gain relevant traffic, inbound linking as well as social signals and brand awareness These can be utilized by search engines for زيادة مشاهدات اليوتيوب (check out this blog post via Socialwb) content assessment of quality.

content amplification lifecycle

4) Brand Awareness and Signals
Search engines can use brand name and reputation to determine the credibility of your website and how trustworthy it must be within their ranking algorithms. In addition to boosting your content Social media can also create brand awareness. Google calls this co-citation. These co-citations can be developed through social media to improve Google's credibility and aid in brand-name searches.

5.) Social Indexing
Since search engines index social media sites and display them in search results pages. This allows your business to show up in search results that include branded search queries on more than just your own website. But it gets even better than that. Individual tweets on Twitter were once indexed and shown in search results too - enabling another way for your website to be ranked in the search results. The service was temporary for a few months before Google decided to discontinue 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.