Everyone wants to have the best possible search engine ranking they can – the top spot in Google gets about 56% of that particular keywords traffic. That is quite a bit of traffic, depending on the keyword. Also, if you already have a converting page then you know that means money in your pocket.  This new year is going to be exciting, but are you ready and willing to do what it takes to be on top?

Search optimization and social media go so well together for various reasons, one of which is the fact that social sites are indexed quickly, so that means backlinks are gathered from them. It also means more content mentioning the site from sources that the search engine sees as authorities (Facebook, Twitter, other social media type sites).  Twitter does have a bit more juice than Facebook, due to Facebook not being completely public – Twitter is public by default.

One of the factors you need to consider when looking at the SEO benefits of these kinds of links would be overall search ranking gains achieved. Do the social marketing backlinks you are putting out there help you with your search rankings? How have you been building your social authority in the search engines eyes?  Are you doing enough to succeed in today’s online world?

Google and Bing have opened up recently, and admitted that social marketing backlinks are considered when ranking a site. They take the authority of the person and the authority of the people connected to that person as followers or friends. If there are more re-tweets, or “likes” on a link, more conversation and discussion, are all factors that are weighted for a search ranking for a website. In a way it is treated the same way Pagerank is.

Links from Twitter are nofollow, but they are used as a type of social signal for the search engines to compute a persons social authority. They take the overall “author quality” as a factor when deciding what weight to assign. This does not mean that other sites are nofollow, there are in fact many sites that give you follow links AND help you accumulate “social media backlinks”.  Facebook imparts some follow links, as well as others like identi.ca – both of which are PR 8.

So the new SEO strategies should target this specific mix of backlinks and social authority, and creates more authority and more links to its main and social properties.