If you own or manage a small business you’ve probably heard all about how social media and online marketing will help grow your business. Maybe you’ve even done some research into SEO and learned how to use keywords and other tactics to improve website traffic. If you aren’t quite there yet, don’t worry! This is part 2 in a series of blogs from Pixel Power, and part 1 has all the info you need to know about two beginning strategies for Search Engine Optimization. But once you’ve got the basic idea it’s time to move on to a new, more complex subject; how can you use social media to impact SEO?
This question has been debated by industry professionals for years, and the ever-changing nature of the internet does not make it easy to keep up. It seems that most people can agree that social media does affect SEO in one way or another, but what we aren’t sure of is how. Thankfully marketing industry leaders like Hootsuite, Lyfe Marketing, and others have been collecting information and conducting research to help us sort this whole thing out. But before we can jump into hard facts and statistics, let’s discuss some backstory.
HISTORY LESSON
Our story begins in 2010 with Danny Sullivan’s article for Search Engine land. In this article he claims that Google considers links shared on social media when calculating ranking the ranking of a website. This means that if a link to your website was shared on social media, all those instances of posting or sharing would count in the algorithm that determined whether your site is a trusted source of information. Shortly after this, Matt Cutts, an official representative from Google at the time, made a video publicly confirming that links shared on social media did directly influence your site’s ranking.
Two years later, in 2014, Matt Cutts makes a second video saying that Twitter and Facebook are treated like any other website, but activity on these platforms is not considered a ranking factor for other sites and goes on to give a few reasons why. So now things have changed from our previous understanding that sharing links on social media counts toward back