Search Engines Are Getting Social

Now that both Google and Bing have admitted that they've been using social indicators as far back as 2010, it's time to consider your social presence as part of your SEO (search engine optimization) strategy. The fact of the matter is that the number of times that people have "liked," "tweeted," or "+1'd" a given page definitely helps the page ranking during a search.

Search engines view the number of likes your page gets as an indicator of your website's popularity and usefulness, so it's pretty obvious that if you can increase that number, then your ranking will improve. It's obviously not the only factor in the page ranking, but it's quickly becoming one of the main ones. It's not only search engines; your website's visitors also use these indicators as a sign of trust.

But you can't get likes if you don't have a button on your site. You can get some easy copy-and-paste buttons via AddThis or ShareThis, but you can also get them directly from the source.

Facebook Like - http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/
Twitter Tweet - https://dev.twitter.com/docs/tweet-button
Google+ - http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/+1/button/index.html

Nows the time to add these buttons if you've not done so already. Your page ranking might depend upon it.

-----------------------------------

Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.