Social Media & Ranking In Search Results

Using links as an Off The Page ranking factor was a great leap forward for search engines. But over time, links have lost their value for a variety of reasons. Some sites are stingy about linking out. Others block many links to help fight spam. Links get bought and sold, making them less trustworthy.

Enter social media. If links were a way for people to “vote” in favor of sites before, social media sharing is a far earlier way for that type of voting behavior to continue. Social signals are continuing to rise as an important ranking factor that search engines are using.

Social Reputation

Just as search engines don’t count all links equally, nor do they view all social accounts as being the same. That makes sense, since anyone can easily create a new account on a social network. What’s to prevent someone from making 100 different accounts in order to manufacture fake buzz?

Nothing, really, other than fake accounts like these can be easy to spot. They may have few “quality” friends in their network. Few might pass along material they share.

Ideally, you want to gain references from social accounts with good reputations. Having a social account with a good reputation of its own is great, too. So participate in the social world in a real, quality way, just as you would with your web site.

To understand more about how search engines are making use of social signals, see this in-depth report below:

What Social Signals Do Google & Bing Really Count?

Social Shares

Similar to links, while getting quality social shares is ideal, being shared widely on social networks by many is still helpful.

Again, participation in social sharing sites is crucial. If you don’t have a Twitter account, a Facebook fan page, a LinkedIn group, you’re missing out on opportunities to be easily shared. You’re not building up a network that can help spread the news.

What about Google’s recently launched Google +1? That is yet another form of social share, and one that Google says definitely is a factor in your favor for rankings.

Pre Published on http://searchengineland.com/guide/seo/social-media-ranking-search-results

Content & Search Engine Ranking Factors

You’ll hear it over and over again. Content is king, when it comes to aiming for success with search engines. Indeed, that’s why the Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors begins with the content “elements,” with the very first element being about content quality. Get your content right, and you’ve created a solid foundation to support all your other SEO efforts.

Content Quality

More than anything else, are you producing quality content? If you’re selling something, do you go beyond being only a brochure with the same information that can be found on hundreds of other sites?

Do you provide a reason for people to spend more than a few seconds reading your pages?

Do you offer real value, something of substance to visitors, anything unique, different, useful and that they won’t find elsewhere?

These are just some of the questions to ask yourself in assessing whether you’re providing quality content. Do provide it, because it is literally the cornerstone upon which other factors depend.

Below, some articles on the topic of content quality from Search Engine Land, to get you thinking in the right direction

Content Research / Keyword Research

Perhaps the most important SEO tactic after creating good content is good keyword research. There are a variety of tools that allow you to easily, and for free, discover the ways that people may be searching for your content.

You want to create content using those keywords, the search terms people are using. That effectively lets your content “answer” them.

For example, a page about “Avoiding Melanoma” may be using technical jargon to describe ways to prevent the most dangerous type of skin cancer. If people are searching for “skin cancer prevention tips,” then writing in the wrong “language” might cause search engines to skip your content as a possible answer.

Create content that speaks to what people are searching for, that uses the language that they themselves are using. 

Content Words / Use Of Keywords

Having done your keyword research (you did that, right?), have you actually used those words in your content? Or if you’ve already created some quality content before doing research, perhaps it’s time to revisit that material and do some editing.

Bottom line: if you want your pages to be found for particular words, it’s a good idea to actually use those words in your copy.

How often? Repeat each word you want to be found for at least five times or seek out a keyword density of 2.45%, for best results.

OK, that was a joke. There’s no precise number of times, and even if “keyword density” sounds scientific, honest, even if you hit some promised “ideal” percentage, that would guarantee nothing.

Just use common sense. Think about the words you want a page to be found for, the words you especially feel are relevant from your keyword research. Then use them naturally on the page. If you commonly shift to pronouns on a second and further references, maybe use the actual noun again here and there, rather than a pronoun.

Content Engagement

If you’ve written quality content, then users will be engaging with it. To determine that, search engines may try to measure engagement in a variety of ways.

For example, did someone search, find your page in the listings, clickthrough but then immediately “bounce” back to the results to try something else? That can be a sign that your content isn’t engaging. It’s also a metric search engines can measure.

Are people sending a relatively long time reviewing your content, in relation to similar content on other sites? That “time on site” metric is another thing that search engines can measure, such as through toolbars that both Google and Bing offer.

Social “likes” of the Facebook type and other varieties are another way that engagement might be measured, and we’ll cover these more in the Social section of this guide.

Search engines are typically cagey about if they use engagement metrics much, much less exactly what metrics they may use. But we do think it is a factor being measured in several ways. Success here is highly linked to the quality of your content.

Content Freshness

No, you can’t just update your pages every day thinking that will make them “fresh” and thus more likely to rank better with search engines. Nor can you just add new pages on anything constantly and think that gives you a freshness boost, either.

However, Google does have something it calls “Query Deserved Freshness.” This means that if there’s a search that’s suddenly getting unusually popular versus its normal activity for some reason, Google will look to see if there’s any fresh content on that topic and give it a boost toward the top results.

If you’ve got the right content, on the right topic when QDF hits, you may enjoy being in the top results for a week or two or three. Just be aware that after that, your page might disappear. It’s not that you’ve done anything wrong. It’s just that the freshness boost has worn off.

 For More visit http://searchengineland.com/guide/seo/content-search-engine-ranking

What to Use: A 301 Re-direct Or The Canonical Tag

The canonical tag by Google has proved very useful for SEO purposes. It eliminates most duplicate content issues and is very easy to implement. However is it being used correctly?
The Canonical Tag : What Is It For?

The canonical tag in my opinion is for websites that produce multiple version of a page with different URL's. For example :
http://www.example.com/product-1.php
produces the same page as :
http://www.example.com/product-1.php?sort=price-high-low
and :
http://www.example.com/product-1.php?sort=price-low-high

All these variations of the same page could potentially be indexed by Google and be penalized for having duplicate content. If you were to put a 301 re-direct in place that re-directs to : http://www.example.com/product-1.php, then you wouldn't be able to see : http://www.example.com/product-1.php?sort=price-high-low etc.

By using <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/product-1.php"   /> in the <head> part of the HTML document, you could ensure that only one variation of the page get's indexed by Google but all variations of the page would be visible to your customers / audience.

To sum it up the canonical tag is for when you want lots of variations of your page to be visible to your viewers, but you only want one version (the main one) of the page indexed by a search engine. Which leads me on to my next subject nicely..
The 301 Re-direct : What Is It For?

The 301 re-direct is for when you want to change the URL of a page / website. Example:

If you wanted to change http://www.example.com/product-1.php to http://www.example.com/product-2.php

Then you would set up a 301 re-direct from the old page to the new one. By doing this the old page would be inaccessible to viewers and the next time search engines come to index that page they would know that the page has moved location to the URL it get's re-directed to.
Conclusion

The canonical tag would tell Google which page you want to be indexed, but it would still leave both pages visible to viewers. Also quite important; the canonical tag wouldn't pass as much (if any?) link weight (page rank) to the new page.

If you want maximum SEO benefit when changing the URL of a page, you should chose to use a 301 re-direct over the canonical tag.

referred link- http://www.seoconsult.com/seoblog/seo-techniques/what-to-use-a-301-re-direct-or-the-canonical-tag.html