The increasing importance of social signals in search

Before a few months ago, search engine optimisation seemed rather cut and dry. Google, for the most part, used a combination of factors to determine where a website should rank. One such factor was links. Each link to a website carried a value and this value added value to the website being linked to. One might say that the more links to a website, the higher the website would rank. For the most part this was accurate, assuming that the links back to the website weren’t from websites which had absolutely no value. There was always a lot more to it than this, but for the sake of this article let’s assume that was the case.

Over the past few months a great deal has changed in the search arena. Everybody’s heard about Google Panda and fortunately we’re not going to waste time talking about that exhausted topic. But instead, let’s take a look at how social signals are affecting the search results and search engine optimization. Before it was about links — search engines saw back links as “likes”, for lack of better word. But now we actually do have likes, and shares and plus one’s, so the search engines have realized that this is another great way of ranking websites. Instead of a website just getting value from the links that point to it, the website could also get value from people’s opinions on social networks.

Here are two important facts:

1. On average there are one-million links shared on Facebook every 20 minutes.
2. 25% of tweets shared on Twitter contain links.

For Google to deliver accurate results, social media had to be factored into the algorithm. We can talk about Facebook and Twitter; however, Google+ has emerged and, as Google product, Google naturally favours it (as a recent study shows). Not only does this study show us how Google+ is going to play a big role, it also shows us that Google is taking social seriously and so should you. One of the most important things for marketers to do is correlation research; research that looks closely at data and determines which social networks are most influencing the decisions Google is making. Correlation is not causation, however, it can most certainly be used to make decisions.

Side Note: A wonder project called The Open Algorithm, started last year in June. Some of the articles on this website are incredible and mathematicians may get lost in the numbers.

The point here is that regardless of how possible it is to measure what factors influence a websites ranking, it is crucial to understand that a mixture of search engine optimisation and social media is required. Thousands of tools have been created for measuring and monitoring back links (limited free), on-page factors (limited free) and rankings (paid). All of this software relates to previous ways of doing search engine optimization and although still incredibly important, they don’t focus in on social media nearly as much as they should.

There are tools such as BrandsEye (paid) that monitor social signals and shares — these tools are just the start of what’s to come. As social becomes more and more common as an important factor for driving traffic and ranking content, so will the awareness increase and with this awareness will come more options for measuring. The point here is that if you seize the moment you put yourself ahead of your competitor before the rush of software options arrives.

Next time you’re trying to optimise your website or hire a company to do your optimization, be sure to include social media rather than shunning it for the single reason that your audience might not be there. Before doing so, you might like to investigate whether you should be concentrating on social or search.