Advantages of Social Signal to SEO: What Is It?

Many people have heard of SEO and most people have heard of social signal, and are probably involved with to some degree, social media, and a term which largely means websites (like Facebook and Twitter) that are based on consumers interacting and communicating with other consumers and uploading or sharing content. The crossover between the two is termed as social SEO and the purpose of it is to use social media to boost your business's search engine rankings.

You cannot rank your business’s site via social SEO alone; instead you can obtain good rankings by paying no attention at all to social factors. Why bother with social SEO then, if it is not indispensable? Because positive social activity around your site makes it easier or faster to rank your website in search engines - directly through the authority that search engines give to Likes, Tweets and +1s, and indirectly through exposing your content to a broader audience, some of whom will link to it from their own websites. Social SEO is not a separate branch of SEO and it will not soon be replacing traditional SEO. Social signals are apparently becoming increasingly integrated into search engine's algorithms though. Social signals are not as significant as backlinks, and they will not be for a long time, if at all, but backlinks aside, social signals are about as significant as anything else. In the course of the last year or two the question is no longer "do social signals have an effect on site rankings?" but instead "how much of an effect are they having?”

No-one knows for sure precisely how much of a factor social activity is in determining where your website ranks for your targeted keywords, as none of the search engines have made public that info , however, there is no denying that it has a relevant factor that does affect where your site ranks. The significance of social SEO has been gradually increasing and is highly likely to continue improving in importance as well. If your business operates in an industry where your competitors are doing both traditional SEO and social SEO then you have no choice, if you want to achieve good rankings for good keywords, but to involve yourself socially too. Backlinks as well as social signals will outrank backlinks alone, so you will get left behind if you are only building backlinks. If your competitors are not involved socially online then whilst it lessens the need for you to be involved, it presents a better opportunity for you gain an advantage over them.