Our best friends on the net are the search engines. They guide us to pages, blogs or websites that we seek. Their importance will not diminish in 2014. But with them will rise another powerful force – the Social Signal. It will give you reason to trust a website, to open a report.
What is a Social Signal
A Social Signal is an indication of human likes. It is a number that tells you how many people have liked an article or video or how many times a page has been shared. It is the best way to judge the popularity or relevance of a page.
Why is it better than Search Engine Signals
A search engine can guide you to a page that may or may not carry content you are looking for. This is because the page ranking has been generated by the search engine algorithm. It collates a wide variety of signals to come to a conclusion.
For instance, Google uses over 200 machine signals or electronic footprints left behind by net users to generate page rankings. These signals include the number of times a page has been downloaded, the number of high quality external links that link to the page, the keyword match percentage, etc.
However, all these signals still lead to a broad generalization. At best, they narrow your search and bring you closer to what you are searching.
The Social Signals, in contrast, are more specific. They are human generated, and are like a thumbs up or thumbs down for an article or video. You can decide the popularity, relevance or authority of an individual article or video by seeing the number of likes garnered by the page.
You can also decide the trustworthiness or popularity of a website by seeing how many people have endorsed it. Websites too realize the value of social signals. That is why they publish the number of their Facebook fans or Twitter followers prominently.
Which Social Signals you should publicise
It is difficult to decide which social signals work best for you. A simple rule of the thumb is to go with the biggies. Social Media sites like Facebook, Linkedin, Google+, Pinterest or Twitter have members hips running in millions. It therefore makes sense to place their share buttons on your blog or website.
You can use two kinds of share buttons. One, which helps users to share your content; and two, where the number of shares or likes are indicated by a number. The second one obviously is a better share button because it sends out a clear social signal.
But make sure that you mine the power of social signals. They can leverage your content better than most search engine optimization tools.
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