Social media is in the spotlight of all SEO companies after recent changes to Google algorithms. It’s now the number one way of increasing the amount of web traffic flowing through to your website. It’s led to questions about what this is going to mean for other SEO methods and whether this has changed the way every website has to approach promotion.

What Happened?

Google Penguin and the updates after it led to various SEO metrics changing. Whilst we can’t prove this because Google won’t reveal how much each factor influences ranking, SEOs have reported how the effects of their techniques have changed. The value of hyperlinks and keywords has dropped significantly. The highest metrics are social media.

Obviously, Google+ gets the most emphasis since this is backed by Google. Twitter and Facebook follow close behind.

The Drive to Relevancy

The SEO rankings are designed to help the most popular websites appear at the top and the least popular to appear at the bottom. In the past, they’ve been relatively easy to manipulate. It’s why you could type a search string in and get results completely unrelated to what you were looking for.

Google has always wanted to make the sites at the top more relevant to you. They want to make sure the most popular websites reach the top. The easiest way to do this is to take social media into account. If people are talking about something it means it’s more popular.

Now you have to rely on other people to increase your SEO ranking. You can’t just pay an SEO company to make a few backlinks. You need to rely on total strangers to promote you.

What Does this Mean to You?

In short, companies have to cater to their customers for the first time. Their marketing campaigns need to be less self-serving. If they’re to succeed, they have to produce content that people like and that will actually want to share. You can rate how hard this is depending on what category you’re trying to target.

If you’re involved in building or accountancy, you’ll have to rely on customer reviews and testimonials. Blog owners can rely on funny and amusing pictures and stories. The latter will need to focus more on social media than the former, though.

Does it Change the Way You Promote Yourself?

It doesn’t mean older SEO techniques are now irrelevant. Webmasters still have to optimise their websites if they’re going to succeed in ranking highly in the Google search rankings. All it means is you’re going to have to sign up to the big three or four social media websites, and these are:

• Facebook.
• Twitter.
• Google+.
• LinkedIn (assuming you’re more business orientated).

It doesn’t take much to fulfil your social media quota. There are so many plugins and add-ons which automatically share your information to your social media channels. Make sure you get full email notifications of any direct messages from these websites. Try to encourage interaction by replying to any and all queries you receive.

Today’s guest post is authored by Neal Henderson. He is a popular freelance writer and a SEO genius. He has written many SEO, business and computer related articles. He recommends megawebtraffic to his readers who want to increase their Google page rank.