How Social Networking Drives Better Google Rankings

TweetIt’s getting a whole lot easier to get better Google rankings  for “money keywords” —- if you are a SOCIAL animal.

The Center for the Creative Arts (COCA) whom I am connected to on Twitter, is ranking #3 out of over 62 million competing websites for the crucial keyword ‘performing arts‘ because they are social.

Center for the Creative Arts (COCA)

Ed Mayuga at AMM communications, a public relations firm in Saint Louis is ranking #4 out of over 8 million results ( just under Wikipedia) for the money keyword ‘public relations firm‘ because he knows the benefit of social networking online.

Ed Mayuga at AMM Communications

There used to be only one way to get better rankings in Google.

Get more links.

I’m not going to go into how links work for better Google rankings in this post — if you want info on that read this post or this post.

Long story short — it WAS and STILL IS very important to be getting other websites around the web to link to your website.

And it WAS and STILL IS very hard to get other websites to link to your website.

This New Ranking Method Is Still About Links…

…but these links are of a different nature.  They are not hyperlinks that are pointing at different web pages.

They are about Google finding that you are linked to someone on the social web.

They are looking for real social relationships.  Evidence of discussions, connections and real kinship between you and the other members of the World Wide Web.

Google figures (and rightly methinks) that if I want to attend a performing arts event, I will likely want to do it with COCA, after all I am connected to them socially.  They figure that if I need Public Relations work, I will likely want to conduct business with my friend Ed Mayuga.

This is powerful stuff everyone.

And no doubt this will make social networking an even “buzzier” buzzword moving forward.

What do you think about social networking?  Are you using it?  Do you see any value in it? Are you seeing your social media connections driving better Google rankings?