For online marketing, there are many useful tools to use besides Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to increase the page ranking for the targeted website. Especially social signals and Social Media Marketing (SEM). To understand why social signals and SEM is used to boost the ranking, it is essential to understand the definition and how they work in the search engine world.
Social Signal
Social signals by definition are referring to the combination of the shares, likes, upvotes and the overall social media visibility for a targeted webpage as perceived by search engines. These social activities greatly contribute to the organic search ranking of the webpage which is perceived as another form of citation that is similar to backlinks.
To the search engine, the main objective is to provide high-quality and relevant content to the users and the search engines will gauge the quality by how frequently a URL is seen throughout the web by the users online. Since there are more and more web communications that are related to social media, Search engines providers such as Google, Yahoo and Bing have integrated social signals as part of the ranking criteria in the search engine.
A website that has a strong social signals shows that this site has a good domain authority and indicate the URL’s value. Especially when large numbers of users online have shared and like a particular webpage, it proves that the page is genuine and contains quality, substantive or entertaining content. Due to the fact that there is so much sharing taking place on major social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Social signals are becoming increasingly important to SEO as time on page, editorial linking and content quality. To increase the search rankings for the website, business owners or webmasters must have a good, solid strategy that is designed to increase the social media engagement via links to all the popular social media platforms.
Social Media Marketing
As mentioned earlier in the article, social media has played an important part that influences how the search engine ranks the webpage that has a high volume of social media visibility. Social media by default has the capability to create posts, blogs or videos that can go viral and become popular within a very short time frame. Back then people used to write quality articles that were rich in keywords with the intention to predict the exact phrases that people on the internet would search for to increase the page ranking of the site. While this concept will still work but if combined with the social media marketing, it will greatly increase the chance to make the post more interesting and popular with excellent content, best phrases and clever hashtag in the article.
While it is a constant challenge to gain exposure for the post especially with millions of new pages that are created on a daily basis, it is useful to boost the site by using marketing tactics such as lucky draw or giving freebies to encourage people to upvote, follow the post and even share the post to other people to gain more publicity which the hashtags and links will create more backlinks and increase more traffic to the site.
Once the objective is done, the site owner will need to retain their followers as long as possible to gain their loyalty and support in order to increase or maintain the page ranking of the webpage. One thing to take note is that Never ever attempt to cheat the system by buying followers online to support the post as search engines like Google can detect this and penalize the site owners in the long run.
One benefit of using the social media marketing is that it promotes and encourages external sites to link to the content which is much easier to achieve than other SEO methods. Getting external links will certainly help in the page ranking of the site as long as the links are from reliable and high ranking sites.
This with the combination of quality content, strong social signals and the good use of the social media platform to promote the site, social media marketing will definitely help to establish the authority status on social media as well as increasing the site’s popularity and increase the SEO ranking of the website in the long run.
