Did you know viral marketing is the most powerful marketing type? Word of mouth offline is impossible to manage, but with online social media the world is our oyster! With more people talking about your brand, products or services on social media everyday there are more websites and businesses that will naturally link to your website if your content is good. Did you know Cheerios are more talked about than Disney Land? Even general mundane products and services, which you think are not social, will get talked about. Anything can go viral, and social media is a great way to build word of mouth and natural SEO.

So this point differs to the above because we are now talking about links from social media sources as opposed to other websites finding you on social media sites and subsequently placing a link on their website. In 2011 11% of the linking profile for top ranking websites on Google for the most competitive terms were from no followed social sources. Today it is close to 20%. Increasing the number of links from social sources are beneficial for organic rankings.

Yes, you probably didn’t hear it here first but how many times do you overlook it? After all, Google’s algorithm is based on citation, getting links were seen as votes to a particular webpage or piece of content. Now in the wake of the penguin updates and bought links being seen as spam, what else are Google using to really determine what people thing is good content? Yes, of course it’s social endorsement. Facebook like and shares, tweets and retweets, Pinterest pins, Google +1s and likes on Linkedin are all relevant social endorsement to prove credible citation. Google first started using social endorsement as an algorithm indicator since December 2010.

If your content is being shared online at the time of a time sensitive search you will appear higher up. For example, a blog that is receiving a lot of social endorsement will be shown higher up for a relevant search query to do with that blog. It’s only temporary depending on the virality of the content which is normally a short burst, however it does mean that fresh well written content can compete in hard hitting optimised content for competitive search terms by being social endorsed. Where this happens, our clients benefit from significant increases in organic traffic to their site.

Search Plus Your World is where Google will show websites that have been +1-ed by your connections higher up in the search results when you are logged into your Google+ account. In some cases 40% of search traffic is coming from users logged into their Google+ accounts. With 350 million active users on Google+ this can make a significant difference to your website’s rankings and therefore traffic.

Marking up your website content socially is important, particularly using author or rel=author tags. This can increase the exposure of your blogging content but also when your content appears in the SERPs it includes a picture of the author. This can increase CTR by up to 25%.

Google is changing the SEO landscape significantly with Penguin updates and huge volumes of SME businesses in the UK have been affected, all because they used agencies that bought links. At Blue Ocean we are proud never to have bought a paid link, fact. We get results through social media and good quality content. So if you want to do SEO well, you need to do Social Media well. If you want to know how we can improve your social media and SEO with a combined strategy then please feel free to contact us, we would love to hear from you.