How Social Media Affects Search Engine Ranking?

This is a common question which most of the professionals ask for after the latest ranking algorithm was introduced by Google.  As I was looking for an appropriate answer, this is what I found out.

Here are some interesting facts which answer the above question. Let’s have a look.

Social Backlinks are a Priority:

Google has started giving more value to backlinks from social sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn and so on. So, it’s the right time to invest some time in Social Media, because it will enhance your site’s SEO.

Social Media Drives Traffic:

This is something which everyone knows. Google gives preference to websites which has more traffic, and thus affects SEO.We get loyal visitors to our website mostly through social sites and other referrals. And don’t forget that these visitors are our potential customers.

Social Media, a proof for website performance:

If social media profiles are performing very well then, it’s good to integrate them with your blog or website. This is a common trend which is followed by most of websites/blogs nowadays, as Google understands it as a positive signal when there are more quality followers, friends, likes and +1s. But, don’t try to fool Google by purchasing followers, likes and +1s.

Social Media , a SERP booster:

Sometimes it becomes very difficult to rank in searches for certain keywords. Google is very generous enough to give you an alternative help to boost your rankings. This help comes from none other than social media sites which enhances SEO and elevates search rankings.

Social Media reflects good content:

We all know that Google’s love for good content will never end. But, it also appreciates when more people recommend good content through social likes, +1s, and shares. This also makes your content more popular and influences ranking factors to a great extent.

Recent Updates in July 2012

 

Some of the changes which happened recently have made a significant change in the world of internet.  Let us discuss here.

Twitter gets upgraded:-

Twitter has now upgraded with new features like “search auto complete” and ‘People you follow’ search results to twitter.com. Some of the latest additions in twitter are:-

• Spelling corrections: If a word is misspelled, twitter will automatically show results for your intended query.
• Related suggestions: If you search for a topic for which people use many terms, twitter will provide relevant suggestions for such words which are used in majority during conversation in Twitter.
• Results with real names and usernames: When you search for a name like ‘Jeremy Lin,’ you’ll see results mentioning that person’s real name and their Twitter account username.
• Results from people you follow: In addition to seeing “All” or “Top” tweets for your search, you can also now see tweets about a given topic from only the people you follow when you select the “People you follow” option. Viewing tweets about a topic from just the people you follow is very useful way to find information and join the conversation.

Social signals are replacing links as a quality signal for Google’s  ranking algorithm:-

It is said that Google is now going to give more priority to social media compared to the backlinks for assessing the quality of a website.  So more than directory submissions and business listings, social visibility and user acceptance are essential.

Now users can mute Adwords display Ads:-

Google has launched a new feature for users to disable adwords ads. Google says it will take this feature as a way to deliver more relevant ads to consumers. Once a user mutes a certain ad, he or she will no longer see ads from that campaign. After the ad is muted, the user sees a confirmation, which leads them to the option of Google’s Ads Preferences manager, where they may further fine-tune Google’s profile of them.

Bing gives a new option to disallow links:-

In this case, you can now go into Bing Webmaster Tools and mark any links coming into your site that you “disavow”, which Microsoft says will “tell the engine you just don’t want to associate your content with “that” site. This tool simply allows webmasters a way to alert us – a signal if you will – to the fact they don’t support a particular link (or group of links) pointing to their site. Whether from negative seo, an old paid link effort they’d like to distance themselves from, or whatever, the tools allows them to tell us how they see the link, essentially.

An Overview of Ethical Link Building Tactics

This article is basically describes how to deal with some of the link building practices. Link Building should be done carefully and should abide by the laws of ethical , white-hat SEO.

Here are a few guidelines to build links effectively:

anchor text symbol

Anchor Text:

Always use anchor text whenever you are linking to a particular website. This is very useful as it keeps your content clean and representable. Also search engines prefer anchor texts, as this is easily understood by search engines.

Absolute Links:

Absolute Link

It is always good to use absolute links as compared to relative links because these links are accessible anywhere from the web. It is recommended by Google to use absolute links as it is easily found out by crawlers. For example <ahref=“http://www.domainname.com/index.htm”>Go to Home Page

Inbound links

Natural Inbound Links:

It is always advisable to use Natural links linking your website which are related to your website content or topic. Google prefers natural links as compared to artificial unrelated links.

Paid Links:

Paid Links

Don’t use paid links from link farms or any sort of unrelated reciprocal links unnecessarily. Google will remove those links automatically and can also reduce your website rankings.

 

Redirected Links

Redirected Scripts:

Avoid using links through redirected scripts. Also it is not good to use any JavaScript links. Google will penalize your website, if it finds your website using any ill practices for link building purposes.

Link Building Tips by Some of the Best SEO Experts

Link building tactics are very important as it plays a very important role in justifying the content on your website, and also increases more chances of visibility in the search engines.

Link Building

However, if you ask any professional about this topic, each one will have a different opinion about it. What is more important to know is which method works and which does not. This blog is for those who are still in a dilemma, of link building. I have recently, gone through many articles on link building and here are a few points which I have concised for you. These are as follows:

• Believe in Quality rather than Quantity: Basically this statement is meant with respect to how many quality backlinks your website has, and not how many websites or inbound links are linking to your website.

• Unique material: Any content, which is repeated again and again becomes very boring for your readers to read. So, writing a unique content would actually make it much more interesting and hence will drive more visitors to your website.

• Guest Post: This is the most effective and long lasting method to build links or promote your product or services. But getting a guest post is quite difficult. Try to build good relation with other authors or bloggers and I am sure you can get hold of atleast one guest blog or post. Not to forget, 1 guest post from a good site is much better than getting 5 from crap sites, as mentioned by popular expert Rae-Hoffman-Dolan.

• Infographics: If your website has some high funda, say for example financial services, then writing articles or unique content on it becomes very boring and hard to understand for your readers. So, you should prefer some great pictures, which represent great deal of information and make your readers really interested in what you want to say. This can benefit you in two ways. First, it will make people comment on your blogs and more and more readers will read it, which will increase your website traffic. Second, it will help you to create more links without even trying too hard, and will naturally boost overall rankings.

• Socially Engaging: Make your pages or content socially engaged with Social Platforms like Facebook comments plugin(SEO-friendly, indexable version), Pinterest boards, Twitter evangelists etc.

• Build Great Audience: This may sound quite difficult, but it’s really effective when it comes to link building or promoting your website or products. You should be socially active and have your profiles in various social media sites, for example Google+ which is a great in creating authority. Also Facebook fan pages are also good enough to get a decent fan following.

• Reviews: This is also another way out to link your website , but before that you will have to reach out to find review bloggers in your niche like using Followerwonk to search twitter bios and ask them to write reviews which have both positive as well as negative opinions regarding your content and as well link to your product reviews or your website pages.

• Link Distribution: Use the links you can control for product pages or in your actual content, but also make sure you’re building links through attraction to other pages so you have a more natural link distribution.

• Social Bookmarking: You can hand build (unnatural) links to that review through bookmarking, external articles/content and social shares you’re still going to want real links hooking up to your product reviews or target page of your website.

• Article/blog Marketing: Article marketing is going the way of the VHS tape and while it’s not quite dead you should stick to the sites that have kept their authority status. Such sites include Infobarrel.com, Work.com, Yahoo Voices, Buzzfeed.com and even still places like Hubpages.com and Squidoo.com.

• Forums and Discussions: Follow some related discussions in forums, set up relevent google alerts related to your topic and find a perfect opportunity to drop in a link for your post.

• Lead People to your Product or Target page: Another way you can build links is to do a search for threads, Q/A sites and similar websites, where people ask questions about certain products or topic which is related to your product or topic. Forums are a great place to recommend a review; in comments on blogs if there is a need for it (forcing the mention of your review won’t do any good). The most effective way is to find where the buzz is about the topic and make yourself useful there, which will lead people to your product reviews or your target page of your website whether you link to it, mention it or use it as your signature.

If you want to know more about link building, then read this article where various experts and affiliates discuss about their own personal views on link building.

How interesting pictures help to make a perfect blog?

As you may have noticed many blogs have least one picture in it. I started thinking this at first that these pictures simply add some flair to the blog posts, but now, I’ve realized how many benefits it gives to include these pictures.

First, it gives some color to the site where the blog is posted. Especially the black and white theme looks so boring ,that it really needs some color to brighten it up. Its good to pick very bright, eye-grabbing photos, to snatch people’s attention, and then direct it to the posts.

Second, it helps as a navigation tool for the blog. When people are looking through your site, having large pictures can help people remember where they are on your blog. It sounds stupid, but they can count the pictures and remember what post they’re on. This helps people who are looking for a particular article, to find it, as opposed to just skipping your blog all together.

Third, it also helps as a navigation tool within the actual post. When people are reading a post, especially when it’s one just large block of text, it’s easy to lose your concentration in it. You look up for just a second, and look down and you’ve lost your place, then you have to spend precious seconds finding it again. With a picture in the post, you subconsciously connect where you’re reading, in relation to the picture. This give you the ability to look away from the screen, and back, and easily find where you are.

Fourth, when you first visit a website, you instinctively scan it once, just giving it a “look over.” If you have some really interesting and funny pictures , this will cause the people to look again and read your blog post. This also really helps for visitors from social-media sites. It keeps them on the site longer, and hopefully will be persuasive enough to get them to read the content.

Fifth, pictures help individualize posts. People mentally begin to affiliate your posts, with certain pictures. They’ll remember which post had the smiling faces and had the funny images. So when people want to find specific things, they’ll know right where to look on the page.

Sixth, it takes up text space. Now, before you laugh at this, this is a very legitimate way to help loosen your blog writing load. A few pictures in your post, can make a 600 word article, look like a 1000+ word article. That is a Huge Victory for you! Nobody wants to read 1000+ words, but everybody wants to think that they just read one. If you’re a good writer, you should be able to say what you want in 600-1000 words, but with the added pictures, it gives the allusion of much more researched, and intelligent looking articles. You look good, your site looks good, and your reader feels good. Everybody wins.

Seventh, it breaks up long blocks of text. Reading an article or a blog can get boring very quickly, when it’s just one large block of black on white. You get distracted, you get annoyed, you get lost in the page. Lots of different things can happen, that can be solved with a simple picture in the center, to break up the post, make you smile, and then return to reading. It’s truly amazing how much a great picture can do to our perspectives.

Eighth, it brings humor to your site.Your goal is to make the visitors stay on your blog enjoyable. Pictures are a great way to get people to laugh. When people laugh, they are enjoying your content, which means you win!

Ninth, pictures are a great way to say “this is important!” Or “read this again!” You can use pictures to get emotion from your readers, in ways that pictures can’t. Whether you want sympathy, laughter, acknowledgment, joy… Pictures can help you draw in your readers, and hammer in the “prompt,” or “hint,” you were trying to get them to understand.

Tenth, pictures can also get you extra traffic. By merely posting a picture, they can draw tremendous traffic and also if the picture is indexed in search engines, you gain all these benefits.

Eleventh, pictures say a thousand words. No, even more than that. Pictures say what words can’t, no matter how many words you might use. But with a simple picture, you can easily say what you want.

Pictures serve a very wide assortment of uses, elaborating a point, drawing in a reader, advertising a product, making the visitors stay enjoyable, drawing emotion from readers, helping them navigate your site, there are tons of valuable things you gain. All of that benefits you get , from only posting a picture in your blog.

Latest updates by google for the year 2012

 There are certain recent updates made by Google on SEO in 2012. Here are some of the changes made in order to improve our systems, including related searches, sitelinks, autocomplete, UI elements, indexing, synonyms, safe search and more.

Here’s a list of updates:-

• More coverage for related searches. [launch codename “Fuzhou”] This launch brings in a new data source to help generate the “Searches related to” section, increasing coverage significantly so the feature will appear for more queries. This section contains search queries that can help you refine what you’re searching for.

• Tweak to categorizer for expanded sitelinks. [launch codename “Snippy”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] This improvement adjusts a signal we use to try and identify duplicate snippets. We were applying a categorizer that wasn’t performing well for our expanded sitelinks, so we’ve stopped applying the categorizer in those cases. The result is more relevant sitelinks.

• Less duplication in expanded sitelinks. [launch codename “thanksgiving”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] We’ve adjusted signals to reduce duplication in the snippets for expanded sitelinks. Now we generate relevant snippets based more on the page content and less on the query.

• More consistent thumbnail sizes on results page. We’ve adjusted the thumbnail size for most image content appearing on the results page, providing a more consistent experience across result types, and also across mobile and tablet. The new sizes apply to rich snippet results for recipes and applications, movie posters, shopping results, book results, news results and more.

• More locally relevant predictions in YouTube. [project codename “Suggest”] We’ve improved the ranking for predictions in YouTube to provide more locally relevant queries. For example, for the query [lady gaga in ] performed on the US version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in times square], but for the same search performed on the Indian version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in India].

• More accurate detection of official pages. [launch codename “WRE”] We’ve made an adjustment to how we detect official pages to make more accurate identifications. The result is that many pages that were previously misidentified as official will no longer be.

• Refreshed per-URL country information. [Launch codename “longdew”, project codename “country-id data refresh”] We updated the country associations for URLs to use more recent data.

• Expand the size of our images index in Universal Search. [launch codename “terra”, project codename “Images Universal”] We launched a change to expand the corpus of results for which we show images in Universal Search. This is especially helpful to give more relevant images on a larger set of searches.

• Minor tuning of autocomplete policy algorithms. [project codename “Suggest”] We have a narrow set of policies for autocomplete for offensive and inappropriate terms. This improvement continues to refine the algorithms we use to implement these policies.

• “Site:” query update [launch codename “Semicolon”, project codename “Dice”] This change improves the ranking for queries using the “site:” operator by increasing the diversity of  results.

• Improved detection for Safe Search in Image Search. [launch codename "Michandro", project codename “Safe Search”] This change improves our signals for detecting adult content in Image Search, aligning the signals more closely with the signals we use for our other search results.

• Interval based history tracking for indexing. [project codename “Intervals”] This improvement changes the signals we use in document tracking algorithms. 

• Improvements to foreign language synonyms. [launch codename “floating context synonyms”, project codename “Synonyms”] This change applies an improvement we previously launched for English to all other languages. The net impact is that you’ll more often find relevant pages that include synonyms for your query terms.

• Disabling two old fresh query classifiers. [launch codename “Mango”, project codename “Freshness”] As search evolves and new signals and classifiers are applied to rank search results, sometimes old algorithms get outdated. This improvement disables two old classifiers related to query freshness.

• More organized search results for Google Korea. [launch codename “smoothieking”, project codename “Sokoban4”] This significant improvement to search in Korea better organizes the search results into sections for news, blogs and homepages.

• Fresher images. [launch codename “tumeric”] We’ve adjusted our signals for surfacing fresh images. Now we can more often surface fresh images when they appear on the web.

• Update to the Google bar. [project codename “Kennedy”] We continue to iterate in our efforts to deliver a beautifully simple experience across Google products, and as part of that this month we made further adjustments to the Google bar. The biggest change is that we’ve replaced the drop-down Google menu in the November redesign with a consistent and expanded set of links running across the top of the page.

• Adding three new languages to classifier related to error pages. [launch codename "PNI", project codename "Soft404"] We have signals designed to detect crypto 404 pages (also known as “soft 404s”), pages that return valid text to a browser but the text only contain error messages, such as “Page not found.” It’s rare that a user will be looking for such a page, so it’s important we be able to detect them. This change extends a particular classifier to Portuguese, Dutch and Italian.

• Improvements to travel-related searches. [launch codename “nesehorn”] We’ve made improvements to triggering for a variety of flight-related search queries. These changes improve the user experience for our Flight Searchfeature with users getting more accurate flight results.

• Data refresh for related searches signal. [launch codename “Chicago”, project codename “Related Search”] One of the many signals we look at to generate the “Searches related to” section is the queries users type in succession. If users very often search for [apple] right after [banana], that’s a sign the two might be related. This update refreshes the model we use to generate these refinements, leading to more relevant queries to try.

• International launch of shopping rich snippets. [project codename “rich snippets”] Shopping rich snippets help you more quickly identify which sites are likely to have the most relevant product for your needs, highlighting product prices, availability, ratings and review counts. This month we expanded shopping rich snippets globally (they were previously only available in the US, Japan and Germany).

• Improvements to Korean spelling. This launch improves spelling corrections when the user performs a Korean query in the wrong keyboard mode (also known as an “IME”, or input method editor). Specifically, this change helps users who mistakenly enter Hangul queries in Latin mode or vice-versa.

• Improvements to freshness. [launch codename “iotfreshweb”, project codename “Freshness”] We’ve applied new signals which help us surface fresh content in our results even more quickly than before.

• Web History in 20 new countries. With Web History, you can browse and search over your search history and webpages you’ve visited. You will also get personalized search results that are more relevant to you, based on what you’ve searched for and which sites you’ve visited in the past. In order to deliver more relevant and personalized search results, we’ve launched Web History in Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, Morocco, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Estonia, Kuwait, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Nigeria, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Bosnia and Herzegowina, Azerbaijan, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Republic of Moldova, and Ghana. Web History is turned on only for people who have a Google Account and previously enabled Web History.

• Improved snippets for video channels. Some search results are links to channels with many different videos, whether on mtv.com, Hulu or YouTube. We’ve had a feature for a while now that displays snippets for these results including direct links to the videos in the channel, and this improvement increases quality and expands coverage of these rich “decorated” snippets. We’ve also made some improvements to our backends used to generate the snippets.

• Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launch codename “Venice”] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal. 

• Improvements to English spell correction. [launch codename “Kamehameha”] This change improves spelling correction quality in English, especially for rare queries, by making one of our scoring functions more accurate.

• Improvements to coverage of News Universal. [launch codename “final destination”] We’ve fixed a bug that caused News Universal results not to appear in cases when our testing indicates they’d be very useful.

• Consolidation of signals for spiking topics. [launch codename “news deserving score”, project codename “Freshness”] We use a number of signals to detect when a new topic is spiking in popularity. This change consolidates some of the signals so we can rely on signals we can compute in real-time, rather than signals that need to be processed offline. This eliminates redundancy in our systems and helps to ensure we can continue to detect spiking topics as quickly as possible.

• Better triggering for Turkish weather search feature. [launch codename “hava”] We’ve tuned the signals we use to decide when to present Turkish users with the weather search feature. The result is that we’re able to provide our users with the weather forecast right on the results page with more frequency and accuracy.

• Visual refresh to account settings page. We completed a visual refresh of the account settings page, making the page more consistent with the rest of our constantly evolving design.

• Panda update. This launch refreshes data in the Panda system, making it more accurate and more sensitive to recent changes on the web.

• Link evaluation. We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.

• Safe Search update. We have updated how we deal with adult content, making it more accurate and robust. Now, irrelevant adult content is less likely to show up for many queries.

• Spam update. In the process of investigating some potential spam, we found and fixed some weaknesses in our spam protections.

• Improved local results. We launched a new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. Now we’re better able to detect when both queries and documents are local to the user.

 

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