Social’s Impact on SEO

Link building has been a staple of search engine optimization since the first webmasters started using the most basic SEO tactics in the mid-1990s. Back then search engines were not nearly as powerful as they are now and didn’t have the impact on web traffic as they do today. Webmasters were able to get away with many black hat SEO strategies like link spam and hiding links. Now, search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo are much more aware of the black hat tactics and have continuously adjusted their algorithms, making link building a much more trying task than it has been in the past. Link building has become more of link earning by relying on creating quality content that is naturally shared by people who read it. This means that link building is now heavily based on getting your content read. So the important question is, how do you do that?   Of course, everyone is going to say “write quality content”. This is a no brainer, but you could write best content in the world and you still may never get a link if nobody reads it. Social's impact on SEO has transformed how often content is received and read by users. Sharing your content socially is without a doubt the most effective way to distribute your content these days. With just a simple click of a mouse, you can reach millions of people that access social media sites everyday. There are many websites that have contributed to social's impact on SEO, inlcuding Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Most social media followers are users interested in what you have to say, whether it be industry news, or news specific to your company. This creates a team of link builders for your content because if your social followers enjoy the content, they may potentially share it with their friends and followers. This exponentially increases the reach of your content and in a sense, crowd sources links to your content.   Gaining links via social media isgoing to impact your site’s search engine rankings due to the domain authority the potential links will gain, but it will also establish your social media outlets as valuable to your followers. Social's impact on SEO allows you to essentially kill two birds with one stone. This is why I recommend that every piece of useful information businesses add to their sites, they share socially. If you have a blog, share every post on social media. If you have a sale next week, share it on social media. If you have anything valuable to your customer base, share it on social media because if you aren’t providing your customers with content, you will miss out on many potential links. They might even forget you exist.