2 Reasons Why Google Likes Social Media Pages

Social Media and Search Engines

The short answer is search engines like social media because people like social media and people are clients. Here’s the long answer.

This post is about why Social Media gets so much attention from the search engines and how this information can be used to structure a Social Media Marketing campaign.

What do search engines do?

Let’s think for a minute about what search engines do. They provide listings of links to content in response to keyword driven searches. The objective is to provide users with the following:

1. recent information when necessary
2. the most relevant information possible

There are many ways that a search engine can get this information: For example many Social Media sites are crawled by Google on an hourly basis. Perhaps more often than that. I’ve seen content rank in less time than that. So where does Google get this information from anyway?

How websites attract Search Engines

The highest priorities are websites where there is significant online interaction in the form of commenting, sharing and voting. These websites get crawled and indexed by Google and certain things are noted. The search engine can track the following:

• comment activity in blogs and social media
• voting such as polls, LIKE’s, +1′s
• sharing of links
• the page rank of the page being crawled
• keywords and related items
• whether links on a page are follow or no follow
• anchor text of links and images
• the keyword is in the page titles
• the keyword is in the url of the page

This list probably isn’t comprehensive but is meant to illustrate the point that Google has deep access to current information about what’s going on with the world wide web.

Social Media has the most recent activity:

The most recent Social Media information comes from:

• active blogs
• large forums
• social media sites such as Facebook and YouTube.

Blogs are a lower priority than social media sites because most blogs aren’t that active in comparison to Social Media and Forum websites. That is why Google likes these types of websites.

Have you ever done a search and noticed that results are dated from 2007 or 2009? I can’t think of a recent search where I didn’t require current information.  I routinely narrow my searches to the last 12 months and frequently the last month. I would say 9 times out of 10 anything older is of no use to me at all.

Search engines place a high value on websites that generate a lot of daily activity. They also place a higher value on the pages on social media that have a lot of daily activity. Let’s say we are a search engine and we are looking at 2 Facebook pages both going for the keyword Social Media Strategies.

• Page A posts every day, has many connections and has commenting and sharing activity related to Social Media Strategies.
• Page B posts a couple of times a month, doesn’t have many followers and doesn’t get much engagement from people that have connected with the page.

All things being equal, Google will blow away Page B and serve some information from Page A in response to the search for “Social Media Strategies”. But how does the search engine establish relevance on a Facebook page?

Relevance by Google in Social Media:

• On page keyword density
• website title
• website domain name with keyword
• post title
• image anchor text
• link anchor text
• Categories
• tab names
• About pages

You may have noticed that these are all on page ranking factors for websites as well. Right…the factors are the same for websites and social media platforms. We don’t know how heavily these factors weigh in relevancy analysis. We do know that by themselves they produce little in the way of results when trying to rank for competitive keywords on websites. For competitive keywords you won’t get anywhere near page 1 unless you go beyond On Page Optimization.

However this does not seem to be the case in Social Media; let’s consider Facebook. Good quality on page optimization appears to have a powerful effect on getting a Facebook page ranked quickly. This is probably because many page owners on Facebook don’t seem to think much about on page optimization. This makes Facebook pages less competitive than website pages in some cases.

Off Page Optimization occurs naturally when you use social media correctly and this by itself is a topic for a very long blog post.

It used to be that we established relevancy to the search engines by creating back links with anchor text that included the keyword. Until recently this was all that was required if done correctly and in addition to On Page ranking factors. A campaign that looks like this today is doomed in a competitive environment but many practitioners are still doing it anyway. And if your competition isn’t using social media this approach would be ok.

Today, relevancy is established through on page factors, back links and the most important factor is now Social Media activity such as sharing, bookmarking, commenting, likes and +1′s. If you’re not getting the social media response and you have a competitor that is, rising to the top will be almost impossible.

Why Search Engines Like Social Media: a Summary

So what have we learned. Google likes Social Media because it is timely and relevant and provides Social Proof of the influence of a posted piece of content. Google thinks the best content is relevant and timely. Back links do not prove relevance and recency and neither does on page optimization. This is because back links and on page optimization are normally user generated which doesn’t give any indication whatsoever about the popularity of a posted piece of content. Social Media activity is harder to fake and that is what makes it more highly prized for search engine decision making.
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Net-Zilla in the News – 02/02/2012

Excerpt from a February 2, 2012 article from The Times newspaper in Maple Ridge

Local Businesses Learn About Social Media

By Sylver McLaren, The Times February 2, 2012

ABOUT 30 PEOPLE ATTENDED THE BUSINESS TO BUSINESS SOCIAL HELD AT THE ACT ON TUESDAY.

The Downtown Maple Ridge BIA is getting techie.

Net-Zilla Web Consultants have been retained for the next year to provide Social Media Marketing services for the business association.

“Early in our discussions with the BIA it became apparent to me that there was opportunity to help the BIA in Maple Ridge to use Social Media better to further the goals of the group,” said Doug Shortt, Principal Consultant for Net-Zilla.

Net-Zilla will be creating a Facebook page that is dedicated to promoting local businesses through a variety of methods. Such methods will include active daily posting, building connections with consumers in the Lower Mainland, and enlisting participation through the use of polls, questions, comments, contests, and coupon marketing.

In addition, a YouTube Channel will be set up for member training on how to use social media effectively in addition to another YouTube Channel set up to promote local business videos.

Net-Zilla provides services to set up their clients on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn.

“I feel the most important thing that we offer is strategies to help clients learn Social Media and what it can do for their business,” said Shortt.

“Local businesses that rely heavily on traditional promotion methods are missing a big opportunity,” said Shortt, who’s with the Maple Ridge-based company.

BIA executive director Ineke Beokhorst said there is a lot of interest in learning how Social Media works.

On Tuesday night the BIA held one of its most well attended monthly meeting.

“About 30 people came to the meeting. It’s obviously a popular topic. There was a lot of interest,” she said.

Affiliate Marketing for Niche Websites

Affiliate Marketing is a very effective way to monetize a website. The best ways to implement an affiliate marketing program are not widely understood and will be discussed in this post.

Affiliate Marketing Steps

Always start with keyword research. Start by entering a broad keyword into the Google Keyword Tool and refine your search from there.

Select up to 30 keyword phrases that look like they have a level of search demand high enough to monetize your site. To learn Affiliate Marketing you must learn this step. Try to keep it simple. Google makes setting up your affiliate campaigns a much easier task. Put yourself in the shoes of your target audience and role play what they might type into Google to find your promotion.

Research content for your site. If you are going to give away a report construct it so it begins to solve an urgent  need for your target audience. It should have a action title and be no more than 10 pages long. The report outline will define the bullet points on your landing page which should be on the root domain of your site.

Affiliate Marketing Website

To learn Affiliate Marketing you need to be able to create a WordPress website. Anything you can’t do you must either learn it or pay someone to do it. A simple landing page can be outsourced for small change and Fiverr is a good solution. You’ll be tempted to learn it all to keep the cost down but this will delay your project. I suggest finding an out source when you first start Affiliate Marketing training. This will speed up the process and you can learn as you go if you’re interested.

Traffic Generation

There are two primary ways to get traffic to your offers. Paid traffic from pay per click ads or organic search engine optimization. There are many pros and cons for each method. Paid traffic is useful for short term testing of affiliate offer pages using split testing techniques. When first starting to learn Affiliate Marketing the most simple approach is to create content in the form of articles and videos.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The best way to manage an affiliate campaign is to use an SEO check list. There are a number of on page and off page requirements necessary to get your content well ranked in the search engine results pages or SERPS. On page factors consist of including your target and associated keywords in the title, description, h1 tags, image alt tags and video optimization.

Off Page factors include back linking, the number of backlinks, the quality of backlinks and the relevancy of backlinks. Off page SEO is a complex technical process best suited to being done by professionals. Mess this up and it can hurt your site instead of helping it. It’s good to learn as much as you can however and I recommend that all of my clients be knowledgeable about on page optimization at least.

Marketing Process Wrap Up

Marketing types know great ways to monetize a website and create long term sales revenue. This article has just scratched the surface of Affiliate Marketing  but if you master effective keyword research and On Page SEO you will be more than half way there.

SEO Priority – On Page Optimization or Off Page Back Linking?

What should be the top priority for small businesses when an SEO Campaign is started? The most important thing is Back Linking.

Back Linking involves placing content on a variety of interactive websites that contains a link and anchor text back to your high converting landing page. These are the basic requirements of an Off Page SEO campaign.

An On Page campaign involves optimizing blog post structure, keyword density, keyword proximity, internal linking, link anchor text and image anchor text. It’s possible that you aren’t familiar with all of these terms but the upshot is this; On Page SEO is comparatively unimportant when compared with Off Page SEO and back linking activities.

No one knows for sure but it appears that search results ranking can be achieved without doing much On Page optimization. Before the pitch forks come out, let me qualify this statement. On Page work is important for SEO but more importantly for your human site visitors.

It also keeps you on track by focusing your thoughts on one key phrase per page which is important to your page visitors. In addition, it helps Google to verify the topic of your page and match it to the content of the anchor text of incoming back links.

Google considers links pointing to your site to be a vote for your site. They know that some of these links will be created by the site owner and some will be created by people that are referring to or recommending your content. It is estimated that 80-90% of positive SEO results are gained by off site back linking activity.

What are the requirements for a back linking campaign? You need a focused landing page that has a short sales pitch and a call to action. This call to action can usually involves some variation of this: “Leave your name and email address and we’ll give you something of value.” This is normally a download or a video with some valuable information. This is lead generation.

A well converting landing page is required to gather leads but also to track how many visitors you’re getting. Tracking your page visitors will give you an indication of the effectiveness of your off page campaign. If you find that you are only getting a small amount of available traffic you need to increase your back linking efforts.

A back linking campaign consists of work done on forums, blog commenting, social media posts, web 2.0 properties and article sites to name a few. It takes a great deal more effort  and time than On Page work and Google rewards this effort accordingly.

An additional benefit of back link marketing is the fact that each link with anchor text can be seen by potential customers doing research or just surfing the net. Potential clients actually click on these links which will guide them to your money site for additional information. Think of back linking as the online version of ‘Working the Room’.

Check out this link for additional information about How to Market Your Business Online .