Social is becoming more and more prominent in the search engines. Bing has a partnership with Facebook and Google has Google+, but also tracks public information from Facebook. Both also pay attention to Twitter as well as certain social bookmark sites. In both cases the social signals affect search rankings.
The two primary ways social signals effect search rankings are:
- Public social shares can affect the general rankings. The more people sharing (or tweeting or bookmarking) your website’s content, the better your rankings. (of course there are many other signals being looked at other than social)
- When people are logged into Google+ for Google or Facebook for Bing the search results are personalized, in part, based on social signals. So, if someone liked your content, your content is more likely to show up in their search results. If someone’s friends liked your content, then your content is more likely to show up in that person’s search results. The more of their friends that liked/shared your content, the better the chance of ranking well.
Of course, when people like and share your content, you also have the direct social benefits of their friends seeing the content that they share.
Note: I’m including Pinterest in this post because it’s one of the fastest growing social networking sites right now. I haven’t seen any evidence that Pinterest directly affects search rankings right now, but people do share from Pinterest to Facebook and Twitter (which do affect rankings) and if Pinterest continues it’s growth rate, the search engines might start looking to use them as a direct signal.
Add Social Buttons:
So, with all the benefits social, why not make it as easy as possible for people to share your content. Add social buttons to your website. If you have a WordPress site, adding social buttons is as easy as installing a new plugin. There are several good plugins available, some for just one button and others for many social buttons. Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest all have their own individual buttons available:
There are also services available that provide several social buttons all in one widget. Below are the three most popular:
In most cases, you should be able to add social buttons to your site very quickly. So, stop what you were doing, take 15 minutes, and go add the buttons to your site.
tick – tock – tick – tock…
Great! Now that you’ve done that let us know in the comments below what you added to your website. Also, remember, the more interesting your content, the it will be liked and shared.
Share with us:
- What social buttons do you have on your website?
10 Comments
Hey Kurt, I have blog on WordPress.com and use the social buttons available for the theme Coraline. For each post I have 4 visible buttons – Facebook, google+, LinkedIn, and twitter. And 8 more in a drop down menu – digg, press this, Pinterest, reddit, stumbleupon, tumblr, email and print.
For the blog itself I have RSS, twitter, google+, LinkedIn, Flickr, and YouTube as additional places to connect.
Awesome Cynthia! It sounds like you've got your blog pretty well decked out. Great job.
Hi, i just wanna connect with us!
As a church we've gone for facebook, twitter & googleplus. Haven't quite been able to work out the relevance of pinterest yet. As a small church we're haven't managed to garner much interest yet though so Im not sure how much impact it will have, time will tell I guess!
Thanks for sharing Rowan. How are you using Facebook, Twitter, and Google+? Have you just put the buttons on your site or are you actively trying to engage people on these social networks?
I suggest you monitor which social buttons/badges produce the majority of traffic to your site; use Google Analytics to track this. Then eliminate those that are only marginally productive.
Too many buttons clutter up your website or blog entries and detract from the content.
Great point. A lot of websites suffer from too-many-things-on-the-page syndrome. There are a lot of things we want to get onto pages that we think are important, and they may be important in general, but they may also be distracting and preventing people from getting the main point of the content. Great point!
It is true that social signals effect search rankings. After reading out this impression of SEO I am so pleased and can say that it would come to help us more in the future. Thanks…
Its a very good Seo tip for social networking. When more people sharing your website’s content, your rankings was better. I agree with your thought.Thank you for your sharing.
Thanks for reading the post. In the future, please post your comments with your name rather than targeted keywords, so I know your comment is genuine and not simply a link building campaign.