Most people consider links from social media are active links to your website. One of the most common misconception is that when you post a link from your website on Facebook, this link is considered an active link and will help your website grow in search engines.
Do social media links help my website on search engines?
Most social media mark all links that are posted on them as rel=nofollow. As mentioned before, rel=nofollow means that the link is indeed active and clickable, will drive the user to the destination, but it will not be “seen” by search engines.
So all links posted on i.e. Facebook, are really not helping your website on search engines. They may help you in traffic growth, but certainly not in increasing your authority.
Some other social media though do help your website with links. One of those is Pinterest and another is YouTube. On Pinterest, a simple idea is to pin photos from your website on your business profile, this way, your pins will link directly to your website, which will at some point be considered as active links.
On YouTube, you should add a link to your website in every video you create and upload. Once your videos get popular, those links will help your website gain more links. There is a thing on YouTube called “V-SEO” which stands for Video-SEO. In simple words, when you upload a video on YouTube, you should apply the mentality of our on-site SEO tips, to your video. Write the video’s title as you’d write your on- site titles, add keywords as tags on YouTube as you’d add the keywords on your website and make sure you write enough text in the video’s description, keeping in mind that on each video, around one hundred and eighty words is good. Don’t forget to add the link to your website in your video’s description.
Surely, adding links on the social media platforms that do help your website is not enough. You will have to grow your social media audience and gain some engagement in order to see some impact from social media to your SEO.
What’s the meaning of Social Signs for Google?
Google, considers all social media links and engagement as “Social Signals”, not exactly links but an indication of how many people and how actively talk about you on social media.
The more people “talk” about you on social media, the more important you are so this has to be somehow reflected on the search results. Social signals is not yet a significant factor of ranking in search engines but its growing and may be of considerable importance at some point.
Google+ is a bit different. When you create a G+ page, you now have some options to add your business to Google Maps and more. Whenever you post something from your website to Google+ and once this post goes over one hundred likes, you will start getting some points for this address you shared from your website, as part of Social Signals. Its important though to do so as having your business on Google Maps will help you, plus, you will get a YouTube channel with your G+ page, in which you can upload your videos, all under one brand.
