In the world of internet marketing many of us see the value in SEO and social media, but they often seemed to be separate beasts. However new correlational data is beginning to show that social media signals, especially those from facebook and to a lesser degree from twitter, are influencing search engine rankings. In March and April of this year, SEOmoz ran a Social Media study that looked at 10,271 keywords and then measured the top 30 ranking domains to try to establish a correlation to higher ranking and any one factor. 

The results are pretty amazing; According to the data, the most influential factor was shares of a URL via facebook. While this isn’t causal, it is very strong considering that it had a stronger correlation that that of links! (For reference it’s good to point out that this is out of 200+ factors so getting any correlation higher than a .10 is huge!) While this is great data, its important to note that pages that get shared and retweeted are also earning links, so the relationship is concrete that social media activity will influence rankings. This does make a strong point that social media and SEO really need to get more integrated and if you not doing one or both, get out there and start!

Being active in social media directly correlates with ranking highly.
Correlation alone is enough to make it social media part of your online strategy. Even if they aren’t directly influencing your ranking in Google, you should have a social media. Pages that earn re-tweet and facebook shares also correlate well with earning links, and send direct traffic on their own – to ignore this is very foolish.

I Need to Learn More About How to Earn Facebook Shares
While it wasn’t on the top of my mind before for an online strategy, myself and other online marketers need to develop strategies to earn more traction in facebook to get shares to see if it truly has a direct impact on rankings.