SEO and social belong together for a number of reasons. You can’t have a great SEO strategy online without including social marketing in your campaign. In fact, the two are irrevocably entwined, feeding into each other all the time. When your business has a social presence on social networking sites, it expands your content networks. Any expansion of your content is great for SEO!

SEO and Social

In the past, social sites indirectly affected your SEO rankings when people shared your links on their profiles. These backlinks are still valuable today, only they carry a lot more weight than they used to. This is how it works.

• If your content prompts interaction from people on social networks, it directly affects the ranking of that content. For example, a tweet that is retweeted multiple times is considered valuable because it’s popular—and the search engines will increase the ranking of that linked post.

In terms of SEO efficiency, this means that social interaction directly affects the ranking of your content.

If you’re not on social platforms, you can’t benefit from this ranking factor. Sharing has become a very large part of the search algorithms that we experience today. As a result, SEO and social are bound together.

• If you want your content to rank better, you need it to be on social platforms to encourage viral sharing.
• If you want your social content to go viral, it needs to be organically optimized so that people can find it on the Internet.

This is the natural progression of SEO—to encompass social sharing and make it an essential part of ranking new content. Of course it matters! Social proof is what the Internet is all about! The more content is shared, the better it must be. The search engines use this as a sign that your content is valuable, relevant, and social.

Including Social in SEO

If your only goal before reading this book was to rank well, you have a new goal: to generate viral content for your social networks. Virality is the key to extending the reach and popularity of your content, to organically gain higher rankings in search. Ignoring or avoiding social platforms is a terrible mistake.

They’re not only for personal use, you know! That’s why you have to include a social marketing strategy that works within your SEO strategy. It connects to your content networks and generates sharing and word of mouth advertising. Often this promotion is free. Take advantage of it with every update or post.

This is why SEO and Social belong together. They’re so closely bound to each other, you’d have to be a novice to plan one without the other!