{"id":1025,"date":"2014-04-17T18:28:01","date_gmt":"2014-04-17T15:28:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.webceo.com\/blog\/?p=1025"},"modified":"2023-12-21T14:31:04","modified_gmt":"2023-12-21T11:31:04","slug":"does-seo-stand-for-social-engine-optimization-in-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.webceo.com\/blog\/does-seo-stand-for-social-engine-optimization-in-2014\/","title":{"rendered":"Does SEO stand for Social Engine Optimization in 2014?"},"content":{"rendered":"

“To be or not to be…” on social media? This question keeps stirring up the minds of millions of people concerning the issue of their brand’s or company’s presence on social media channels. The challenge is that no one can clearly measure the ROI of social media in pursuit of getting the most bang for the buck. Furthermore, no one can directly point to social signals as the ranking factor, even Matt Cutts hesitates.<\/p>\n

Do you remember when, earlier in 2010, Matt Cutts kept telling us that social signals have nothing to do with ranking factors and have nothing to do with the overall Google algorithm? Then later, at the end of 2010, he reported on the direct impact of social shares, likes, tweets and +1s and other ways of social signals on the positive rankings in search results? But later, in January 2014, he fully denied the ranking power of social signals. The bottom line of Matt Cutts’ message was that Google doesn’t rely on your social profile performance as a source for extracting and analyzing data, since Google doesn’t have full access to crawl some leading social media platforms. However, Cutts suggests that social networks are a place with a strong presence of prospective leads (followers and interactivity in the same field of business). In other words the main goal for a company pursing a social media campaign is to build a brand’s authority and drive targeted traffic.<\/p>\n

<\/span>What is the state of Social Media in 2014?<\/span><\/h2>\n

Let’s have a look at a recent report made by Shareaholic<\/a>\u00a0(click to enlarge). You can see that the growth of social referrals dominated over that of organic search traffic.<\/p>\n

\"Shareaholic-search-traffic-vs-social-referrals-chart-Dec-20131_sm\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Can we think of the biggest social media channels like Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ as Social Search Engines?<\/b> Yes, absolutely! Millions of folks use social networks as the way to search not only for people, but also for news, trends, hot topics, leads and a lot more. The profiles in the social space are web pages similar to Google SERPs, and the news feed posts are search results specific for each and every user. So, we can easily call Social Media Optimization as the new SEO (we can call it Social Engine Optimization).<\/p>\n

To give credence to the statement that social media is the new SEO let’s have a look at Google search results regarding the query “Forbes” (click to enlarge).<\/p>\n

\"forbes_social_results_sm\"<\/a><\/p>\n

What do you see? That’s right! We see social results in organic positions 4and 5 and the right hand column shows special page results for the term “Forbes.” The more popular the term, the higher social results appear. Social engines give a boost to the most popular social profile pages and brands’ fan pages with a large number of likes, retweets, +1s treating them as if the page owners efficiently conducted white-hat link building by spreading the content pieces throughout the internet with the help of others who thought the content was interesting.<\/p>\n

Read more about how important social media is<\/a> and how to track the rankings of your Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube profile pages with the help of the WebCEO Rank Tracking tool.<\/a><\/p>\n

What are the most popular social engines<\/b> in 2014? And what are the most effective social marketing optimization tips? <\/b><\/p>\n

From the screenshot above, we can count 3 top social media platforms that score well on Google in 2014.<\/p>\n

<\/span>Google+<\/span><\/h2>\n

The first and main reason to play on the Google+ platform is that it is highly integrated with other services and features of Google and Google has full access to its own platform. Let’s see what we have:<\/p>\n