Why Social Media is Important for SEO?

For an online business to achieve success, considering search engine optimization (SEO) is essential. While this once simply involved adding keywords and creating backlinks, there are now many ways that businesses can improve their SEO. One such way is by utilizing social media and this has become increasingly important.The following reasons are why social media is so important to SEO.

A Wider Reach

Formerly, the main SEO strategy involved putting as many links all over the Internet as possible. People did this regardless of whether it was likely that people would click on the links and view their website or not. A much more effective method of reaching a wider target audience is to use social media. Adding good quality content to your social media page draws awareness of your business directly to the right target market and encourages interaction with your website.

Increased Quality Website Traffic

Simple link building does not necessarily draw traffic to your website. Instead, it simply improves your page rank. Using social media increases the chances of people actually visiting your page. Better still, this is high-quality traffic as people won’t simply view the page and then move on; they will stay on your page and potentially purchase your products or services. Increasing quality traffic in this way is a sign of your popularity and can help to improve your page rank just as much as posting links.

Website Popularity

Google once measured the popularity of a website in terms of the number of backlinks leading to its pages. Later, they recognised that people were abusing this system and that the number of links did not necessarily reflect the quality or popularity of a website. Instead, they created a weighting system that meant some links were more relevant than others. Again, there were problems with this system of measuring popularity. Instead, Google began to take into account the amount of interest a site had based on social signals. This includes how people engage in your social media pages and how often a view of these pages leads to traffic to your site.

Natural Link-Building

Link-building is often a time-consuming task and it is not always clear which links will lead to quality traffic and which will simply go unnoticed. Too many unnecessary links are also potentially detrimental to your website SEO. However, when links are posted and shared by other people, they are called natural links and these are valued highly in Google algorithms. Using social media is an easy way of getting other people to share your links. The people who like your social media pages unintentionally become your link builders.

Avoiding Google Penalties

Google began to penalise websites for spamming. This is when you aggressively post links everywhere simply to improve your page ranks. You can avoid this happening by making the most of your natural link-building from your social media pages and combining this with great content. This means that the Google algorithms will recognise your website as a quality site rather than penalizing you for spamming.

For these reasons, it is important that those with a business website add social media to their list of strategies for improving SEO. Furthermore, you can simultaneously use social media as a marketing tool for your business.