Website design, SEO and other Estate Agent News
18
Jul
Google Increases Importance of Social Media
Studies of Google’s algorithm by Searchmetrics managed to
identify 22 ranking factors. They discovered five of the 6 most
prominent factors in Google’s search results were social
signals.
Here are some of the most influential factors found:
- Facebook shares
- Number of backlinks
- Facebook Comments
- Likes and Tweets
They also discovered a few negative factors including Title
Character length and the position of the title keyword.
Backlinks still remain to be one of the most critical factors
that affect your rankings, along with other Backlink factors such
as links containing keywords. However Google’s Matt Cutts has
recently suggested that Backlinks may get discounted in the future,
which this recent study definitely backs up.
Another surprising finding is that strong brands continue to
perform well, even without meeting the usual requirements of
on-page structuring giving reason to presume brand power carries a
lot of weight within the search rankings.
However it is no surprise that Google’s algorithm is
giving social media more weight and search marketers predicted
it.
84% of search marketers said that social signal such as likes,
tweets and Google +1s will be more important in 2012, compared to
last year.
Social media is likely to accelerate more in the near future
becoming more of a crucial factor for Search Engines.
Estate Agents need to be prepared to take advantage of these new
findings or may be left behind.
By Luke Stanley
SEO Consultant
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