social media link building tips guidesOver the past several years, Google has been back and forth with their responses when questioned about whether social signals impact ranking on the SERPS. In the latter part of the last decade, they claimed adamantly that social signals did not factor into their algorithms. A year later, Matthew Cutts, who was still employed by Google and head of the spam team, said that yes, social signals were a factor. A couple of years later, they were no longer a factor in ranking. So, which is it?

Setting all this aside for just a moment, here are some real reasons why social media is an important part of every link building strategy.

Google Isn’t the Only Fish in the Sea

While Google is, without a doubt, the biggest fish in the sea, it isn’t the only fish. There are other search engines, and if you factor in Google-owned YouTube, the second largest search engine, you can easily understand how important backlinking is to a social site as big as YouTube and how it would factor into their rankings. How many clicks through to their videos do they get from website content and blogs around the world? What you may not have considered here is that YouTube is both a social site and a search engine, second only in size to its big brother, Google. In reverse, consider the huge number of websites accessed with video links back to the site!

Social Media Is the Perfect Tool for Blogger Outreach

Some websites are spinning their wheels to get backlinks to their sites. They send out email after email to blogs they’ve found via a search engine, and the sad fact is, the ROI in time and cost are not acceptable. It is a time-consuming undertaking very few mid-sized companies can afford. However, have you ever thought about social sites like Facebook and Twitter that also have their own search engines and set of algorithms specific to them? One leading data-driven marketing team of skilled professionals on clickintelligence.com does the research and then goes about devising a link building strategy that utilizes the value of building relationships with market influencers on social sites.

One Step Further

Developing relationships with market influencers is of vital importance. Social sites are the quickest way to nurture those relationships. If you are looking for high ranking blogs to share links back and forth, the very best and quickest way to find them is on social sites. One thing to keep in mind here is to use a bit of finesse. Don’t just start following a blogger’s social site only to jump in asking for a link from their blog. That leaves a bad taste. If you get on with a high-ranking blogger on their social site, they are apt to click through to your site and engage with you first. Now it’s time to begin sharing backlinks!

This, too, takes time and it is why you will still probably need a data-driven team to work your social sites for you, but that is something you can expect to offer a high ROI. Engagement is the key to finding great places to accept your blogs and for this, social media reigns. However, to find the highest-ranking blogger social sites, SEO is still king. Do social signals impact rank? You bet they do, but in a different way than you would expect from Google.