Google is always looking for ways to weed out low-quality results for the organic (or natural) search engine results pages. This hunt leads Google to make algorithm changes that affects the way search marketing is conducted.

If you don’t pay attention to these updates, you’ll more than likely see less traffic flowing to your website. But stay abreast of these updates and adjust to the changes, and you will experience an improvement in quality all around – of traffic, links, leads, and most definitely search rankings.

More than ever before has social media marketing been a key influencer of your search engine marketing performance. To put it simply, your social media fans and followers are constantly reminded that you have solutions to their problems. You’re tapping into a HUGE source of new, loyal customers with social media. When you have influential sites such as Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest gathering attention about your brand, your “quality rating” (as far as Google is concerned) goes up, and your ranking goes up with it. You’re deemed “more deserving” of the higher rankings in the search engines.

The key is to get your social media community to take the extra step and follow you a little farther – to your website.

Follow these tips to make sure your social and search marketing efforts are aligned for success:

• Produce high-quality that people want to read, share and link back to – on both social and search platforms.
• Use social networking sites to generate great content ideas for your SEO articles.
• Produce content that is relevant and really speaks to your core audience.
• Reply to your fans on Facebook, reply to comments on your Pinterest pins, and thank fellow Twitter-folk for retweeting your content.
• Join in on relevant conversations happening in social media about your industry.
• Place social following icons on your website and blog to encourage content sharing.
• Dedicate a portion of your social media updates to links directing traffic to your blog and website. Just don’t take a strong sales approach to it, and remain casual.

When you build a strong, engaged social media you don’t need to rely on your search engine marketing to do all the work for you. Your website will have traffic coming in from both social and search marketing efforts, so you’re not taking such a risk when Google makes changes.

Here are a few more tips to make sure you’re up to date with Google’s updates:

• Focus on building natural backlinks and stay away from low-quality of manufactures backlinks
• Resist on-page over-optimization
• Don’t create several landing pages for the same keyword topic just so you can rank higher for the many variations of that keyword
• Don’t engage in any “black hat” or illegal SEO techniques… period!

Do you have any advice for doing right by Google? Have you been affected by the updates? How have you adjusted to the changes? Do you find that a strong social media presence affects your search engine rankings?

Comment below with your feedback – we’d love to hear it!

Check out our blogs for valuable tips on building and maintaining a powerful social media presence.

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