A lot of discussion has been floating around the air recently with recent Google updates Panda and Penguin causing a major shake up in the SEO industry.
Many have discussed that SEO is on a road to become a thing of the past, although as many previous changes in SEO that have occured over the years, all that occurs is the good SEO’s will adopt best practices going forward and stop what isn’t working.
The question is what is going to work going forward?
The answer is social signals, the search engine algorithms as the months go by are incorportaing more and more social information into ranking factors.
Now this does not involve a business getting thousands of likes on Facebook, it is all about the concept of engaging your online social network community and successfully making them share and reccommend your information socially.
One of the main SEO ranking factors now has become social mentions, the day might never come when SEO is completely social yet a large portion of ranking factors are attributed to this.
“If Google can see that your website has established a lot of social proof on all social media platforms from a natural and organic spread of your website information, then it knows that your website is worthy of the prime real estate of the front page of Google.” says John Vlasakakis co-Director at SEO company Maps Gurus.
Following SEO methods of the past 2 years is not going to get you very far, your new back link is your customer, visitor, or website enquiry who will share your website on various platforms. Facebook, Twitter, and even recently Pintrest for website with a lot of images and media have been reaping the rewards of this type of online marketing strategy.
I would like to engage all readers to discuss if they have noticed social signals impacting the search engine rankings. After all it is the best metric that is difficult to manipulate.