New Ways to Increase Your Website Rankings

Search engine algorithms are changing. Social signals are getting more important. While links to your website are still important in getting your pages to rank well, recent research at SEOmoz provides clear evidence that social media is playing an increasingly important part in the process.

Here’s an example of what we found. The two pages below were part of a test. They are practically identical. Lots of links were built to the first page. The second page has only one link, but lots of folks were asked to (and did) tweet it.

The question was: which page will rank better?

A year ago, page one would have ranked very well. Today, the tweeted page ranks #1.

How to Take Advantage of Social Signals

Use twitter to communicate about important info on your website. Tweet about a hot sale on a specific product. Invite others to re-tweet it.  Here’s an example:

RT We’re having fun on walking stick prices. Every 10th stick is 80% off. Good luck! http://www.walkingstick.com/example

While the link you tweet isn’t ‘followed’, in other words, Google won’t ‘count’ the link the way it counts followed links from other website, for example, the fact that it is tweeted is counted as a social signal. If your tweet is retweeted (hence the RT at the beginning of this tweet – it means ReTweet), google notices the volume and depth of the discussion around the page or subject. The more tweets, the more google notices that this is important to a larger group of people, also known as a ‘trending topic’.

Twitter Tips –

• Don’t overdo your request for people to retweet your tweets. Reserve it for important launches of new products, sales, events, etc.
• Use an informal tone. Tweets are for fun; don’t be stuffy or sales-y.
• You have 140 characters; leave at least a few extra characters so people can retweet your stuff easily. A retweet of the above tweet would look like this:

RT @SEOmom We’re having fun on walking stick prices. Every 10th stick is 80% off. Good luck! http://www.walkingstick.com/example

The first tweet is 120 characters. The second tweet is 128 characters. So keep a few characters left for your friends and good customers to retweet without running out of space.

Other social signals include mentions of your brand or branded products in Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google Buzz, and Flickr. There are hundreds of industry-specific social media sites where you can engage, amuse and attract potential customers, as well as increase your ‘social signals’ to boost your SEO.

Learn more at A Tweet’s Effect On Rankings - An Unexpected Case Study

Good fortune to all!
Gillian Muessig
www.seomoz.org
@SEOmom