Social Media Links Helping With SEO

It is quite apparent after only two tests that links from social media sites can have a very positive impact on your search engine rankings, especially with Google.

As Adam Snider of Law Depot commented yesterday:

Ranking high in search results is one of the huge payoffs I’ve noticed while submitting to social bookmarking sites. Even if a particular site doesn’t bring a lot of direct traffic, these sites tend to get indexed often and rank high in Google’s SERPs. Even if no one from Digg actually visits your site, just having the link on Digg will boost your search results, which is a benefit that certainly can’t be ignored.

I have been aware of the power of social media links for a while, but our two recent experiments show that you do not have to get to the first page of Digg to enjoy the benefits of social media links.

The two experiments that we have run have resulted in either the blog post itself, or the associated social media site, getting to the first page of Google within 3 days of the post being submitted to the social media sites.

Now if these pages do not continue to gain incoming links I am sure that Google will move the listing down its rankings. These posts will then probably settle in the middle of page 2 or 3 of Google and will continue to generate traffic for months to come.

If we continue to add content to our two web sites and these sites continue to gain incoming links then there is no reason why these posts will fall out of the top 15 spots on Google.

Bottom line is that just a few links from StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit and Netscape can be enough to move your web site up high within Google. If you are focusing on SEO, you need to have social media marketing and linking as components of your marketing strategy.