If you’re a regular visitor to this blog, you’ll know that we’ve been championing the use of Social Media in business marketing for a LONG time! We were among the first in the UK to offer a Social Media Training course, and we’ve written extensively about how important Social Media is in the modern marketplace right here!

Social Media is important for 2 reasons -well, it’s actually important for LOADS of reasons, but my two for today are:

1. It provides a platform for businesses to speak directly to your customers
2. It’s really good for SEO

Most people agree on number 1. Many people are still quite sceptical about number 2, and argue that ‘traditional SEO’ – i.e. link building, on page optimisation etc… still have more effect than Social Media.

If you’d like to learn more about how Social Media and traditional SEO can be used together, we offer a wide range of instructor let training courses including SEO Course , Social Media Training, Beginners and Advanced Google Analytics Training and WordPress Training.

However – it’s hard to ignore the fact that the major search engines are investing a lot of time and money in Social, and that their algorithms appear to be placing more emphasis on Social Media in their SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages)

However a lot of people won’t believe that Social Media has an effect on SEO without seeing clear proof. It was therefore refreshing to see at the recent BrightonSEO conference, a presentation by Paul Chaloner of Fresh Egg which summarised some tests he had done using Twitter providing exactly that. He showed that using Twitter alone, without any other promotion, can push your pages up the rankings (and even on to the front page). Paul called this TweetSERPing. A video and summary of the presentation are below…

Using Twitter for SEO – #BrightonSEO Video

What is TweetSERPing?

Very simply – TweetSERPing is using Twitter to improve web ranking (and is a term I believe invented for this presentation – lets see if it catches on!) Paul’s presentation described two tests that he ran on separate blog posts, where he used TweetSERPing exclusively to improve ranking. Check out the video… a summary is below.

Paul started by asserting that EVERYTHING is a social network. Whenever we interact with anyone, whether that be online, in the pub, at the office, wherever – we are ‘social networking’. Social Media marketing, whilst using modern technology, is just an extension of things that have been going on for years (people recommending things to each other!).

Social Media is therefore complimentary to other forms of offline marketing – it would be very hard (and quite foolish) to try and do ALL of your marketing via Social Media – but its a very important part of the mix.

Likewise – trying to do ALL of your Social Media marketing using Twitter would be folly – but the results of Paul’s tests give a very strong indication that Google is giving plenty of weight to links it finds in tweets, and is promoting the pages accordingly. His tests produced the following results:

Test 1:

• Paul published a post entitled “There are no Social Media Experts” on the FreshEgg Blog (pagerank 4) with the intention of ranking for the term “Social Media Experts”
• The post was published at 9.10 – and was then promoted exclusively on Twitter (i.e the post was tweeted, and then retweeted extensively)
• Initially, the post appeared at number 1 in Google News (as the FreshEgg blog is a respected news source) – but only at 395th in the main SERPS
• After an hour, and around 20 tweets, the post had risen up to 146 in the main Google SERPS
• After around 10 hours, and over 100 tweets, the post eventually ranked at number 3 in Google for the term “Social Media Experts”

Now – that’s pretty compelling evidence. However the FreshEgg site and blog are already heavily linked to on the web, and content published there would expect to do well. Paul therefore ran another test on another, less powerful site:

Test 2:

The site Paul used for the 2nd test didn’t automatically feed in to Google News (like the FreshEgg blog) and had no internal linking. He also used content completely unrelated to that site for the test, only optimised the title tag, and did nothing with the page for 4 days (during which time it was not indexed by Google). Then they started tweeting, and in attempting to rank for the term “SEO vs Social Media” found the following results:

• The page was not indexed at all by Google until tweets had been going out for 2 and a half hours
• However – this is compared to 4 days prior where the page had not been indexed at all
• The page got indexed at a time when it had no backlinks at all on the web – so seemingly tweeting alone achieved this
• After 5 hours or so of tweeting the page ranked at number 60
• After two days and further tweets, the page made it up to 29 for the term “SEO vs Social Media”

So there you have it. It would seem that links in tweets certainly hold weight in Google’s algorithm. These tests show the impact of using Twitter alone – but used alongside other Social Media marketing, including bookmarking sites, Facebook, LinkedIn, guest blogging etc etc… you can reap huge rewards for your SEO.

You can read about both of these tests in more detail on the FreshEgg blog here, and a the presentation slides can be found on Slideshare here

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Tags

Brighton, brighton SEO, brightonseo, Everything is a Social Network, FreshEgg, Google Analytics Training, Paul Chaloner, seo course, seo training, seo training brighton, Social Media Training, sussex, Tweetserping, Using Social Media for SEO, Using Twitter for SEO, WordPress Training

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