Social media is everything! Well, at least it seems that way sometimes. Top social networks continue to rival search engines as top online destinations, so they offer a lot of potential for business marketing. However, did you know that social media and SEO were connected?

Successful product marketing doesn’t begin with tools and techniques. It begins with understanding your audience.

Social Signals

Google and Bing, the two largest search engines, both use social signaling as a factor in determining search results. That means that businesses with many shares, likes, and follows may easily rank higher than those that don’t. Additionally, the search engines annotate search result listings with social media data. These augmented listings may include thumbnail images and information about recent shares. When developing your social media strategy, make sure your take this into account with your goals.

Custom Rankings

Google has introduced a “Search Plus Your World” feature that pulls information from Google Plus to enhance search results. Google also reads data from other social media platforms to create custom rankings.

Link SEO

Links on social media sites often have “Nofollow” attributes. Still, they affect SEO because they encourage users to visit websites and share the links they follow with their networks.

Links shared on social media often end up appearing on blogs and other external sites the contribute to SEO. In other words, social media is a source for secondary links that can dramatically impact the number of inbound links to a website, and therefore, overall SEO.

Author Highlights

Google now includes author highlights in search results. This inclusion means that if you have correctly formatted metadata on your site, you can improve your page rank and visibility in search results. Again, Google gives preferential treatment to Google Plus users, so, you might want to update your profile there.

Author Rankings

Speaking of authors, both Bing and Google are boosting content written by “trusted” authors. This boost means that you and any other authors who create content for your site can leverage social media popularity to boost the position of your content in search results.

As you participate in social media conversations, be sure to keep factors such as credibility and trust at the forefront of your mind. If people begin to trust you and your authors, you can reap significant SEO rewards.

The above five ways that social media impacts SEO only begins to tell the story of how you can use your social media activity to boost your standing in search engine results. Get started today by improving the way you engage users on popular social networks.