The Future of Search & Social - Bing Webmaster Center Blog

[HTMLBasicTutor]

If you haven't included social networking in your SEO/Marketing plan, maybe it's time to rethink doing so.

Ever wonder what’s behind the merging of social signals into search? Not too long ago, all SEOs had to worry about were the old standbys: title tags, links, content, etc. Today, and in the future, social signals play a larger part in ranking, so what’s an SEO to do?

...Given no other signals for a new piece of content, a strong social signal can help your item get noticed and possibly take an early lead in rankings, allowing other signals to accumulate and either support or refute the assigned rankings...

The Future of Search & Social

[bogs]

that's right.. google are also considering social networking as a ranking signals..

[SeoInVOgue]

It's very true, now a days everybody is inclined towards social media and why shouldn't they! It's less expensive as compared to SEO or SEM.

[andrew1]

That very much true as nowadays increasing popularity and strong wide network of social networking sites make it worth to use it in our marketing strategy as this is sureshot and instant result giving techniques.

Anyway thanks a lot for this.

[webnewbie]

Social media is playing a significance role on the marketing.They are effective and show satisfying result.And new updates from google have also focus it.

[clydefrog]

blehhh. i was never a fan of social networking. but with the majority of the internet being social networkers themselves, it's kind of hard to avoid it.

>.> guess i should hop on the band wagon.

[Jim Gillum]

So what we are saying is.......
The engines that proclaim to target only a meaningful experience, will include the free food factor......

Come to my party for free food, the crowd is big so I must have quality......

Isn't that similar to the quality of paid visitors?

In the long run....will that be worth the effort?

[peace13]

There are some points which remain unanswered:
1. We know that more number of Retweets matter a lot in terms of SEO.
2. If the number of facebook shares are even more than 1k there is no possibilty that Google is going to provide any importance to that.
3. Positive signals stand good for Google +.
Do we have to just include social media or we have to rethink on the lines to have more number of votes from readers.

[enkonversations]

Social media marketing is really good for creating viral for any information like regarding products or services or for advertising brand because of this reason many people like to do social media marketing for their business.

[tessori]

hi/
Thats true that now a days social media has become the main source to increase the page ranking of your site. because in facebook and Twitter you can have thousands of friends which helps to increase the ranking of your page after sharing it with all.

[theotesla]

Not to mention you build credibility for your brand and a loyal following/community if you do it right. In my experience not all social networks are for everyone, i.e. Twitter works really well for businesses targeting tech-savvy consumers/b2b marketing. Facebook works well for local and service-based businesses and LinkedIn works well if you're trying to reach out on a one-on-one basis to to extremely targeted selling, i.e. trying to get in touch with the chief of sales for Kellogg's etc.

[smileverse]

however we should be uptodate with SEO or else we loose our stand there.

[Balaji Naidu]

Though social media may not be connected directly to the performance of any particular website in Search engine but all these social media definitely helps in increasing the reputation of the business and by way Reputation and branding of any particular website is definitely considered as a point in their SERP Placement.

[theotesla]

Originally Posted by Jim Gillum

So what we are saying is.......
The engines that proclaim to target only a meaningful experience, will include the free food factor......

Come to my party for free food, the crowd is big so I must have quality......

Isn't that similar to the quality of paid visitors?

In the long run....will that be worth the effort?

I think paid advertising attracts high-quality prospects -- but only if you proactively test and retest your campaign. In paid campaigns, don't look at the quantity of clicks, but the ratio of clicks to opt-ins for those particular keywords.

In regard to free SEO traffic methods, you should be using Google Analytics to analyze your pages, keywords, traffic sources and compare them to opt-ins. The number of eyes on plays a much bigger role in free traffic, I think. That's because you can concentrate more on overall branding, name recognition, referral traffic and more -- all without having to worry about paying for every single click that you get.