Google and 'social signals'

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Two years ago social media were mostly just for fun. Now Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and so on are used by millions of businesses across the world to drive traffic, win loyalty and build brands. 

Google and other search engines are starting to take 'social signals' into account when ranking websites in the search results pages. But are they using social signals per se? No. It's actually subtler than that. When you Tweet a link to your Twitter community, for instance, and a bunch of people click on the link, your site experiences extra traffic. Apparently it's the extra traffic that search engines respond to, not the social signals themselves. 

So it's important to make sure your website benefits from social signals. How? When you Tweet a link on Twitter, make sure the content you're linking to sits on your website. If you upload a photo to Twitter instead of your site's own directory, for example, all that lovely 'link juice' flows to Twitter, not your website. 

There are countless social networks to choose from, and they wax and wane in popularity. If you're running a small business there's no way you can get down and dirty with all of them. It takes time, effort and creativity to do it properly. It's best to choose your weapons and stick with them rather than trying to spin too many social media plates at once. Pick a maximum of three networks and stick with them, and you'll stay sane as well as eventually making a decent-sized impact! 

Here's a list of the types of content that you can broadcast in an effort to encourage traffic, bookmarks and back-links: 

• blog posts
• articles
• white papers
• ebooks
• images
• infographics
• fresh site content and redesigns
• landing pages
• competitions
• new products
• bright ideas
• revolutionary information
• contentious stuff

It's all about link bait. Link bait is the kind of content that people love to link back to, re-Tweet or whatever. If you choose Digg as one of your social networks, people will 'Digg' content they like, which pushes it to the top of Digg's front page. Much the same goes for Reddit. StumbleUpon lets you 'stumble' around on the internet and 'like' content based on your interests. Every network performs differently, and each has their own personality. 

Happy networking!