Troy Hollenbeck
Google’s updated search engine algorithm assigns more value to websites that receive a lot of social approval signals. These are indications that social media users find these pages useful or helpful and include such things as Facebook “Likes”, how many times a link to the page has been posted on Twitter, and the number of “+1’s” a site has on Google+.
To increase these social approval signals on your web pages, you need to be active on social media. The bigger the number of your social media contacts, the more opportunities you have to get social approval signals for your web pages to improve their Google rankings. Just more everything, social media influence has a huge effect on your business, and not just truckloads of money.
How many Twitter, Facebook, Youtube followers do you have?
Are you using your social media “Klout” to build your brand and business?
What are “Social Signals” and what do they do???
Increasing Your Social Approval Signals
Once you have a lot of social media contacts, you need to post frequently on social media. Don’t always blast your social network with commercial offerings or they will ignore your future postings or ban you altogether.
Instead, alternate your commercial postings with a wealth of free high-quality content. Forward links and postings that you found interesting, and try to create a personal link with your network members by posting lots of personal information, pictures, and non-controversial comments.
Get social with your visitors as well. When they leave comments, make sure to respond to them quickly.
Try to establish yourself as an expert by providing valuable, accurate information that your network can actually use. This will increase the likelihood that they pass it along to their networks and also can improve your authorship weight by convincing Google that you are an authoritative content provider.
Social Signal Velocity
Google’s search engine doesn’t just measure how many social signals your web page receives. It also looks at how quickly people respond to them. This is known as the social signal velocity.
If you add a posting to your web page and 10 people “Like” it or give it a “+1” over the course of the next month, that has far less value to Google’s search engine than if 10 people “voted” for it within the first hour of its posting. Google now measures the immediate impact of a website’s posting as well as its long-term value to users.
Other Ways To Build Your Social Influence
In addition to building your influence on social media, there are other things you can do to dramatically improve your chances of staying on top of the Google rankings.
The first is blogging. If you don’t already have a blog, you should create one. Blogging is quickly becoming the most common way for like-minded people to share ideas and information with each other online.
Blogs are free to set up and distribute. And existing blogging networks, such as WordPress and Blogger, already include free tools that make it easy to connect with people who are passionately interested in your product niche. Creating frequent, original, highly-informative blogs that include links to your web pages also is an effective and cost-free way of building your audience and cross-promoting your business.
Exploiting The Rising Popularity Of Video
The second way to build your online profile is videos. As playback technology becomes universal, more Internet users are migrating from text-based sites to video, which is faster and easier to absorb.
Converting your content to video is relatively easy using the video recording equipment now included in almost every electronic device, including smartphones, laptops, and tablets.
The most popular videos are those that explain how to do something, so if there is a way for you to present helpful information to your social network using videos, you should use it. Just don’t forget to include links to your web pages and to optimize your videos with the most effective keywords.
Finally, whatever type of content you create always be consistent with tone, style, design, colors and logos. These are all elements of creating your brand.
You can strengthen the effectiveness of your social signal campaigns by creating an effective, recognizable brand in the minds of your social network. The more you do to build the comfort level of your visitors, the more likely they will be to want to spread the word about your content to their own network of friends and family.
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