Most people don’t understand the importance of social networking links and how sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ have an influence on SERPs. There was a common belief that the links that come from a social networking sites are not that important since they have the “nofollow” attribute included. However, this was proved to be a misconception and the exact same thing can be said for Google+.

Although this service is quite new, we have to take into consideration the fact that it is launched by Google – the same company that owns the search engine that the majority of us use to complete searches every day. It is quite obvious that Google is integrating the social signals extracted from the Google+ network into search engine rankings and numerous experiments can be found online proving that Google+ shares and +1s had an impact on SERP. The problem is that there are many things that can be mentioned.

The Influence Of Your Circles On SERP
The results that you see when you search for something are a lot more social than they were in the past. If you have your Google account synchronised with the search engine, you will see different results than a person that does not. In addition, the circles that you have and that you are in will impact the results that you receive and that other people receive. This is something that is not widely known should be taken into consideration by businesses offering SEO in Leicester and London.

You have to try to get as many Google+ shares, +1’s, Facebook likes, shares, tweets and retweets as you can. No matter what people are telling you, this does have an impact on rankings for both you and the people that you are connected with.

Optimising For Search Engines
If you are a search engine optimisation specialist, you need to try to get as much social love as possible in order to improve rankings. The power of articles, images or posts that become viral is huge. Whenever optimising your site, you need to try to optimise it for both search engines and social networks. In this case, you need to make sure that you include a Google +1 or Share button. However, the hard part is convincing people to click on those buttons. By adding a sentence that invites them to click when they like the information provided will have a huge effect on your rankings on a long term basis.

On the whole, you need to be a part of all major social networks and learn how to obtain those very important +1s and shares as they do have a huge effect on search engine rankings.

By Sarah-Jayne Culver; a Digital Marketing Consultant at http://www.fdcstudio.co.uk/ providing Digital Marketing Services throughout the UK