subject: The Role Of Social Networking In Seo [print this page] Search engine optimization has changed a lot during the last couple of years, and one of the biggest changes is the growing influence of social networking in SEO. Search engine giants like Google, Yahoo! and Bing as well as nimbler services like Blekko and DuckDuckGo are now incorporating social data on search results, and for new, up-and-coming businesses trying to build their presence through search, this is quite good news.
The game-changer
Social networks contribute a huge amount of personal data online. In Facebook alone, 30 billion pieces of content are shared by its users per month. In an industry where knowing what people are looking for is key to success, search engines have figures out that if people share a particular content, that content is most likely to be good.
According to the white paper New Signals to Search Engines, end users who were unable to vote for content through webpage links are now able to vote through clicks, bookmarks, tags, and ratings prevalent in social networks nowadays. These are very good indicators to Google and other search engines and eliminate the need for webmasters linking to one another or crawler bots.
Personalized results
Another role of social networking in SEO is that it helps produce more personalized search results. One great example of this is Bing's incorporation of Facebook data into its search algorithm, resulting with page results that the searcher's friends on Facebook had liked to show up more frequently. The Microsoft search engine has also recently announced improved results through social network data and collective IQ, meaning content that is popular in Facebook rank in the search engine results better.
In response to Bing's incorporation of social media data to its search results, Google has also unveiled its own "+1 button" and, later on, Google+. So by doing a search while logged in as a Google user, the social data accumulated in by the user in Google+ will help personalize the search results.
Organic search
Google and Bing now provide real-time results to searches, allowing Twitter and Google+ results to appear more prominently than other search results. Several experiments conducted by SEOmoz.org have also shown a dramatic increase in the influence of Twitter and other social networks online on regular search results.
Microsoft has also publicly acknowledged that tweets and Facebook "likes" significantly affect a URL ranking in searches done with Bing, and are also doing some experiments on their own in order to "strike a balance" between this new social indicator provided by social media and other indicators used by the engine to determine relevant content.
It is very clear that the role of social networking in SEO is to help search engines provide more immediate and relevant results to its users. In the long run, this will help businesses that rely on SEO to focus on creating better content that their consumers would like to search for online.
