Over the past few years, Google has added a good number of updates and social search features. Recently, there has been a huge talk about utilizing 'social signals' to rank search results. Nevertheless, is Google presently using these social signals? Expert hold mixed opinions on the same. However, with the amount of popularity it has already gained, it seems like Social Shares is sure to take the entire world by a storm in the near future. Here is how social shares can effectively help link building and boost brand promotion.
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Google along with Bing agrees to the fact that the social shares received by your content on G plus, twitter or facebook can greatly demonstrate your social authority. However, at the same time, you need to know that social signals do have some limitations. It is possible to manipulate the system by either purchasing a set number of followers or encouraging social sharing in ways that may overrule Google's policies of link building. Obviously, Google may have something in place that can easily separate legitimate shares from the purchased ones. Many experts claim that Google has not yet implemented on strategies that would stop individuals from purchasing social shares. However, these claims do not hold a strong base and therefore, purchasing social signals can be a risky business.
No doubt, it is obvious that purchasing social signals can in fact bring about a short-term improvement in the ranking. Nonetheless, its value is sure to diminish in the near future, and therefore, purchasing social signals with an intention to improve ranking is just a waste of time and money. This is the prime reason why numerous experts recommend sharing the content using social plugins. In order to be able to do this, you need to use some additional tools for your website's blog. 'ShareThis' and Digg Digg can help you share your articles across some of the most popular social networking sites.
Almost everyone is aware of how advantageous social networking sites can be. The reason why many love them is that they hold no communication boundaries. It makes it possible for you to reach out to a set of audience who would actually want to share your links. While you are trying to connect with potential new followers, there are chances you may also come across an 'authority user' on one of the social networking sites, and he/she would further share your content with his/her follows. In this way, you succeed in multiplying the effect.
Presently, a good number of social metrics tools are available that can help you organize your online business campaigns. However, not all of these tools turn out to be what they claim to be, and therefore you need to be very careful while choosing one. Here are a few pros and cons of social metrics that you need to know.
Pros:
1. Helps you efficiently schedule your tweets
2. Offers email alerts
3. Prepares a trend of your activities carried out on social media on a daily basis
4. Helps you easily differentiate between your twitter and facebook results
5. Shows you the trend of followers you have achieved over time.
6. Some turn out to be a perfect inbound link manager
7. They function in integration with Google Analytics
Cons:
1. In some cases, it turns out quite tedious to manage re-tweets
2. 'Mentions' are sometimes not accurate. At times, they pull out data that is in fact not quite relevant to your search criteria.
3. In some tools, dashboards do not show statistics like top keywords or top influences and therefore, you need to find them all manually.
Here Is How You Can Compel Authority Users To Share Your Content With Their Followers:
Find Authority Users: You obviously need to hunt for some authority users. Do not just keep on connecting with every authority user you come across. Some may not turn out to be a perfect match for your business and the type of audience you intend to reach. You need to look out for individuals, who have something to do with your business or the service you intend to promote.
Build a Strong Relationship: Do not expect others to do something for you unless you do something for them. No matter who you are, what business you deal with, there has to be a 'give and take relationship'. Therefore, once you come across an authority user, make sure to promote his content. You can do this by sharing his blog posts with your chosen audience. Do all you can to direct traffic to his website. All this is sure to catch his attention. Another great way to build a strong relationship with an authority user is by responding to his posts with motivating comments.
Cooperate Evenly: The authority user you choose may not want to share your content if it is not benefiting his audience. In such a case, rather than trying to compel him to post your content, ask him to post his. This will benefit not just his audience, but also yours at the same time.
All of the above-mentioned strategies can greatly help you in building a perfect relationship with authority figures and this will further improve your social medial status.
It is very crucial that Google sets into place a perfect link-based algorithm that gets all the websites into a level playing position. It may be possible to manipulate the algorithmic system and therefore, it will be wise for Google to discount such a system and keep on updating its algorithms on a regular basis.
Why is it so Important to Create Social Signals?
Google, as we all know is presently the best search engine. It is able to understand people and their relationships with others. Therefore, if you want your website to have a higher search ranking, you obviously need to create numerous social signals for your web content. This is the easiest way to increase your online visibility. You would want your content to be shared by a larger set of audience. Thus, the quality of the content alone is not enough. Your content should also hold a very catchy title. The title plays a key role in popularizing the article. Once people start liking your article, it is sure to get a good number of shares.
They should never show PageRank publicly. To some extent it will help.
Right you’re Mahesh but PR lost it’s value way back people who know about it don’t bother too much. 🙂
Hi Manish, great post and i totally agree with you. Backlinks should always be the foundation and main stats used to rank sites. Google just needs to keep updating their algo to throw spammers and link builders off course.
Like the latest penguin update for example, which has let thousands of people complaining all over the forums. If people realised that link building isn’t easy and that the only links worth obtaining are hard to get they would be having a lot more success.
Social signals are of course important as you can measure the amount of people talking about a specific site. However some fantastic sites are in niches that never really get discussed nor do they hit the eye of the social media giants.
Really enjoyed your post, keep it up
Regards
Lee
Thanks for your insightful comment Lee. As Danny from SEL said link building means getting those “hard links” not those “easy links.” 🙂
I’m, like you, not sure wether social signals will ever be more than an added bonus. However, I do disagree that buying them would be risky (if done properly). It’s just so much easier faking tweets than real links in real articles.
hi Manish,
it’s obvious that seo has gone social.
but with backlinks,we have some nice paid backlink tracking tools to identify our competitor’s link profile,is there any tool to do the same thing for social signal??