Our BMGChat group discussed the new ways social media is affecting content relevance and search engine results. The truth of the matter is that search engines are changing. For all of us who love SEO (we’re geeks, we know), it’s exciting that social media is a huge part of that change.
Search engines are incorporating social data into their results. How does social media affecting all this? Social signals such as tweets, Facebook Likes, and Google +1s are now being included in the gleaning of search results. For example, Bing started incorporating Facebook like data into its search results. Results for pages that a searcher’s own friends had liked show up more prominently. It’s better better when search results are not just based in math and algorithms, but also infused with the opinions of real people.
In order to keep up with the way the web is evolving (namely the HUGE increase in the use of social media) search engines have had to adapt to survive. Google rose to dominate the industry by tracking better indicators of content quality better than anyone else. It developed a complex algorithm that measured which websites were “voting” for others by linking to them.”
Social media networks produce an immense amount of data about what real people like enough to share with their friends and the rest of the world. “In an industry where knowing what humans like is crucial to success, search engines have figured out–taken to heart–a delightfully simple mantra: If people share you content, it’s probably pretty good.”
Here’s how it works: “The links that you build through social media, the references, the authority — all can have an impact in various ways on how you are ranked and listed even in ‘regular’ search results,” says Danny Sullivan. “Social media allows for people to provide more trusted signals.”
When we go to a search engine, we want to find what we’re looking for, immediately and hassle-free. It’s clear that social media is helping search engines deliver more immediacy and more relevant results. In the long run, this will help SEO-directed businesses focus on what they should be doing: creating content people love.
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