Social Media sharing impacts Search Ranking

Ok, so this may not be new news to you that Social Media sharing impacts how a URL ranks in search engines.

I was checking my rankings in Google today and wanted to make sure I was still ranking for previous keywords I noted down.

One particular keyword search I’m interested in is: Social Media Australia

I always ranked first for this keyword, but what interested me is the second result (this is logged out of my Google account on a fresh cache):

Previously I had an article titled Social Media Australia ranking second.

This article was obviously a good keyword match with the Google query, but Google is moving more and more away from keyword rich URLs/ title tags and more to ‘social signals’.

Our article on Social Media Statistics Australia – August 2011 has received a fair amount of social sharing (60+ Tweets, 10+ LinkedIn/ Facebook likes, Google +’s etc) – and as a result has taken the second place in Google Search Results.

As a result from this change I am coming to the following conclusions:

– Google still places a high importance on Domain keywords and content
– Google is placing less importance on article URL and title tags
– Google is placing more importance on how a particular article is shared by social networks.

This is obviously an interesting SEO consideration for all webmasters, site owners and social media participants. This goes to show it’s more important than ever to encourage your readers to share your content via social networks.

Google is an interesting example as it doesn’t have a deal with Twitter (or Facebook) for social data, where as Bing does. We wrote about Bing renewing their search deal with Twitter last week.

It will be interesting to see how Search Engines evolve and incorporate more and more social data.