Social Media valuable for organic rankings?
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Is there a link between ranking higher in organic search rankings and having a good social media presence.
I think there is, the more likes and followers you have the better.
The real question is how to you utilise it, do you regulary share content, put keywords in the share info for the ones you want to rank, how best can you utilise social media to help in organic search?
I suspect social noise is used towards some kind of overall quality score in the search engines.
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Increasing page shares with targeted keywords (1-2) have helped me get rankings. Along with reviews (social) and video.
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Agreed with comments on community-building and the broader value, but it does look like social mentions are having indexing and probably ranking impact. The Twitter connection is a little unclear, now that Google has cut the contract with Twitter for their direct data, but it does seem to be coming into play. Danny had a great interview on it with search engineers earlier this year:
http://searchengineland.com/what-social-signals-do-google-bing-really-count-55389
It looks like Google+ is definitely coming into play, too, especially with personalized results. If you're logged in and have a Google+ account, chances are it's already impacting your rankings. This will probably only increase during 2012.
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Social media does have a direct impact on SEO - links in Twitter, for example, are fed to Google with Twitter's nofollow attribute removed. But the impact of a single link in Twitter is far less significant than a link from a website where is will be seen over and over. The value of a Twitter link increases, though, with the influence of the Tweeter.So, the object is, as others have said, to create a community or, circle of influence.
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Greetings Champion!
It is about establishing yourself as a "thought leader" in your niche, and being established as such Google will mark you as more relevant for that niche. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-best-seo-social-content-strategy-thought-leadership Should be a wonderful article to help you on this quest for Social Media Friend.
Justin Smith
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I would have to agree with Dimitar and say social media should be used as a way to engage your audience and create new networks. We try to use our social media to grow interest in our business and I also have found out increasing facebook fans have not helped in ranking so far.
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It is about gathering a community and making it spread the word and not so much about seo stuff like keywords and so on. Even if ebay did not rank well on google people will still use it as much and talk about it as much.
But search engines do count likes +1s and so on so they are metrics now and yes the more the better.
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