Does Social Media Affect Google Ranking?

If you have spent any considerable time online trying to promote your business / brand, you've probably felt a bit overwhelmed at times with the amount of work involved. You may be wondering, Does Social Media Affect Google Rankings?

Is all the work I put into social media a waste of time?

Social media is a great way to get the word out, it's free and many people are on social media 24/7.

Social media can yield business to companies that do it consistently and really know how to reach their customer base effectively.

Let's learn how social media affects SEO.

Does Social Media Help With Google Rankings?

Yes, and here's why.

Google is actively working and spending money building something called the semantic web.

The semantic web depends largely on Artificial Intelligence and Internet user data to give you, the user a great experience when you are searching online.

When a person searches online, Google wants them to be able to find the information they were looking for quickly.

Take it one step further, they want each user to have an experience that is customized to their actions in other places online besides Google.

Google monitors people and businesses actions online using Social Media.

Basically, when a business is active on social media and Google sees people interacting with the business' brand, it receives signals that the brand is an important part of the community / market they are working in.

In the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) world, this is called social signals.

How Do Social Signals Affect Google Rankings?

Social Signals affect your Google Ranking in 3 different ways:

1. Increased Website Traffic
2. Increased Backlinks To Your Website
3. Increases Your Website's Domain Authority

Those 3 factors are very important ranking metrics Google uses to prioritize website rankings when people perform a search.

In fact Search Engine Journal said the following:

"The increased importance of social signals towards the SEO end-game should prompt you to step up your social media presence everywhere. The major social players will continue to make strides into the SERPs, as seen by Google’s recent firehose access to Twitter.

Sites like Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Tumblr are starting to again increase in impact when it comes to SERPs. These social media sites have millions of regular users, and that’s a resource primed to be tapped." - Search Engine Journal - Does Social Media Help SEO?

The bottom line is this: Google uses Artificial Intelligence to monitor, grow and improve search engine results for it's visitors.

How Does Artificial Intelligence (AI) Affect Google Rankings?

Artificial Intelligence is another way of saying Machine Learning software.

Essentially, programmers have created code that learns and tracks the behavior of humans interacting with computers.

Add to that, the information that is tracked via your ip address, mac address (computer hardware serial number) and your Internet Service Provider, Google knows a whole lot about you and your habits.

They are not the only one tracking and using your habit data to their benefit, Facebook is also a big player in the game of data tracking.

Google's machine learning software is called TensorFlow.

Here's what writer, James Vincent at The Verge had to say about Google's AI Software:

"For Google, this doesn’t just mean using AI to improve its own products. (Although it’s certainly doing that). The company wants individuals and small companies around the world to also get on board. It wants to wield influence in the wider AI ecosystem, and to do so has put together an impressive stack of machine learning tools — from software to servers — that mean you can build an AI product from the ground up without ever leaving the Google playpen.

The heart of this offering is Google’s machine learning software TensorFlow. For building AI tools, it’s like the difference between a command line interface and a modern desktop OS; giving users an accessible framework for grappling with their algorithms. It started life as an in-house tool for the company’s engineers to design and train AI algorithms, but in 2015 was made available for anyone to use as open-source software. Since then, it’s been embraced by the AI community (it’s the most popular software of its type on code repository Github), and is used to create custom tools for a whole range of industries, from aerospace to bioengineering." - The Verge: Google’s latest platform play is artificial intelligence, and it’s already winning.

Google is not joking around when they say that they want to be the #1 company ever created.

They are at war with Facebook to become the go-to provider for all data sharing in the world.

Data Sharing and Machine Language go hand-in-hand and equal trillions in revenue for these companies.

Here's what Google says about their Machine Intelligence endeavors:

"Research at Google is at the forefront of innovation in Machine Intelligence, with active research exploring virtually all aspects of machine learning, including deep learning and more classical algorithms. Exploring theory as well as application, much of our work on language, speech, translation, visual processing, ranking and prediction relies on Machine Intelligence. In all of those tasks and many others, we gather large volumes of direct or indirect evidence of relationships of interest, applying learning algorithms to understand and generalize.

Machine Intelligence at Google raises deep scientific and engineering challenges, allowing us to contribute to the broader academic research community through technical talks and publications in major conferences and journals. Contrary to much of current theory and practice, the statistics of the data we observe shifts rapidly, the features of interest change as well, and the volume of data often requires enormous computation capacity. When learning systems are placed at the core of interactive services in a fast changing and sometimes adversarial environment, combinations of techniques including deep learning and statistical models need to be combined with ideas from control and game theory." - Research at Google

Conclusion

So to answer the question, Does Social Media Affect Google Rankings?

The answer is clearly YES!

As of today, Google depends a lot on backlinks to rank websites.

But, in the future as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Language improve, rankings will largely be based on real human interactivity.

Where is human activity happening the most? Social Media of course.

So no, you are not wasting time building your brands presence on social media. The importance of social media in SEO is only going to continue to grow.

Continue improving your presence and reputation online.

It will all pay off in the end.

Businesses that take social media marketing seriously are setting themselves up to dominate their local market online.

Think longterm not short term and you'll will be just fine.

The following blog post Does Social Media Affect Google Ranking? was originally published on: http://seographicdesign.com/