If search engine optimisation (SEO) is already part of your digital strategy then you would be familiar with importance of backlinking. A strategy by which you build the number of other websites on the Internet that reference and link to your website. Building these backlinks is an indication to search engines of your importance within your niche.

The issue effecting all search engines today is the somewhat dubious “backlinking industry” that has developed using various (not always legitimate) methods to generate backlinks for websites. Artificially built backlinks do not serve the search engines objective of providing the best data and returning the best results for any given query.

A great user experience is paramount to the likes of Google and their success and consequently search engines are looking for additional signals from websites to help improve their service.

What does this mean to you?

The signs are that in the near future backlinking will begin to take a back seat due to an emerging phenomena termed “social signals”.

What are Social signals?

Put simply, search engines increasingly look out for social signals which are earned by connecting and expanding your companies online network in an active 2 way connection / exchange. Social signals imply that your business has something important to say because search engines see people interacting with you through say twitter, facebook or blog comments.

Up until now the majority of marketing efforts online were geared toward one-way messaging, keyword building, link building, banner ads, paid search, etc. These efforts often result in creating no connections or passive signals and search engines see this as “hey the business is signaling but nobody’s listening!”

Social signals are important to search engines because they help validate traditional link signals. Think about this; if a page appears to have a large quantity of inbound links, is relatively young and has earned no social signals, then it’s highly likely Google’s statistical alarm bells will go off.

And trust me, raising google’s suspicion is not good for SEO!

The take home?

Ultimately all SEO campaigns should have cleverly thought out social elements incorporated because “social media successes” have the ability to show content, worthy of links, to a larger community of people able to create those important links.

Next week I’ll follow this up and talk about;

• How to use backlinking and social signaling in your SEO strategy.
• How to build an SEO social signals strategy.
• How to approach you content strategy.

About the author

Peter Engelhardt

Peter has a ridiculous amount of marketing and communications experience. He is an inbound marketing advocate and a new media enthusiast with a passion for spreading his knowledge and blogging. Above all he is the driving force behind Creative Brew and a proud dad.