If you’re still trying to rank your website by focusing on keyword density, backlink anchors and low-quality links, you’re in for a disappointment. Those techniques may have worked in the past, but search engines are changing rapidly. Today, it takes a lot more than “old-school” off-site SEO to rank well. With the widespread usage of social media, you’re company’s social presence now plays a major part in search engine rankings.

Why Social Media Matters

Increasing your presence on social media is hugely important in today’s search world.

Google puts a heavy emphasis on social indicators such as your company’s popularity and how customers interact with you, especially from their Google+ platform. Other major search engines, like Bing, integrate in with your Facebook profile to provide results that are specifically relevant to you, based on your social activity and that of your friends..

This all means that techniques for ranking higher in the search engines are shifting away from traditional SEO methods. Instead, successful companies and site owners are changing their marketing strategies to focus on social media. If you want your website to rank well, you can’t deny the powerful influence that social media have on the major search engines.

Useful Social Media Resources

If you want to rank well in the search engines, you need to focus on creating a strong social presence. Building your reach can be difficult, but it is much easier if you have the right tools:

  • KnowEm – With one search, you can use KnowEm to see the availability of your brand name on over 550 social sites. Establishing your brand is vital to long-term success and KnowEm offers a way to get started on hundreds of popular platforms. The search function is completely free to use, but they offer registration services for a fee.
  • Flare – Flare is an online platform that integrates with your WordPress site. It allows your readers to easily share your content across their favorite social media sites. While they scroll down the page, the Flare panel floats alongside of the text. The easier it is for users to share your content, the bigger benefits you’ll see in the search rankings.
  • Tweak Your Biz Title Generator – This title generator is a great way to spice up your boring blog titles and make them much more attractive to social users. Just enter your topic and the site will generate hundreds of different title ideas. This can greatly impact the rate your content is shared, resulting in your webpage moving up the results..Having a great title can’t substitute for informative content though, so it’s important to make sure your blog posts are top-notch. A great title paired with useful content will especially help on user-influenced search sites like Keeywords.
  • Tagboard – When tracking the efficacy of your marketing efforts, Tagboard is a great social media monitoring tool for seeing how your company’s hashtags are being used. All you do is enter your hashtag on the main page or the top of any results page. Starting with the most recent first, all of the social mentions of your hashtag will be displayed in a Pinterest-style format.

Old SEO techniques don’t work anymore. If you want the most success in the search engines, you need to focus on growing your social presence. By incorporating social media into search results, major engines are able to take advantage of the human thought process. This is only the beginning of social media’s influence on search, so the sooner you begin growing your social reach, the better your website will fare down the road.

Kostas Chiotis writes for Keeywords.com a social search engine. Kostas is a social media specialist and blogger since 2009. He contributes regularly on popular blogs sharing his passion for internet marketing and social media.