SEO and Social Media – How it works together?

SEO and social media are often referred to as two pillars of online marketing. Given the areas they apply on, today one can say that SEO and social media work together and complement each other in multiple ways. Now before jumping right into understanding hoe search and social media work together, let’s take a step back and analyze the history of SEO and Social Media.

As said, SEO and Social Media complement each other; the top companies who are leaders in this industry are rival to each other. They are Google and Facebook respectively. While Facebook has a massive user base that it is trying to convert into revenue, Google has a very well stabilized online media business. Now this is where Search and Social Media crossed each other at first time when Google tried to occupy the social space. There could be number of reasons for this. One might be the focus on future where social media is going to rule the world and other could be to stabilize its search results based on social signals. Whatever be the reason, Google started to acquire lots of social media companies that started this war between seo and social media.

At the same time Google has history of failures when it comes to social media. There were lots of products that were launched and were brutally failed. Some to name as Google buzz, wave etc., now the light in the tunnel glow when Google+ started to get traction. In fact Google + became the first social networking website to achieve 25 million user base so fast. But this doesn’t mean they can rule the social medium.

Search in Social media:

Facebook had a deal with Bing, so that Bing would power all Facebook’s search. If we carefully analyze the social media activities of a user, there is hardly any search. People do not want to search for information in social media at least from Facebook perspective. Twitter may have few searches. But the value is very less. People want to interact and converse in social media. This is the main activity that is going on in social media. Hence there is no point for a social media website like Facebook to create an internal search engine to provide relevant information.

Social Media in Search:

All these days as Google was ruling the SEO or the search industry, their main algorithm was to find relevant links and try to credit the website. The search engine giant had lot of issues with people trying to cheat their algorithm and people trying to manipulate the search results. Now here comes the role of social media. When people are acknowledging a website, they do that because they like something in the website. So this is a potential signal for Google about the quality of the website. This is what technically called as Social signals which are basically valuable data that can be used to give better search engines. And this is why Google has been struggling and will try to leverage this medium.

Now having said how social and search work together it is best bet of the webmasters and SEOs to better utilize this opportunity and create value to their websites.