How Facebook & Twitter Impacts Your School’s Page Rank

We’ve covered the importance of search engine optimization (SEO) in previous blog posts, but things have changed again, as they often do in the world of SEO. The most significant change is that now your site’s placement on search engine results will be influenced by the reach of your social media networks. Having social media influence is now a competitive advantage in SEO.

If you’re trying to generate leads for your school, it’s fundamental that your school’s site ranks high on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. It’s quite simple – the higher you rank on a search engine, the more traffic your site gets, and the better chance you have of generating a quality lead. The objective of SEO is to increase rank of your website, and therefore increase traffic. Technically speaking, SEO is the behind-the-scene changes that can be made to your site in order to achieve this. Changes such as including specific keywords, having quality content, and affiliate links are some ways to improve your SEO. Now you can add to that list “being active on your social media networks.”

Facebook and Microsoft’s search engine have teamed up so now Bing returns results based on the Facebook “Likes” of the searcher’s friends. Google has been including Twitter updates in search returns since 2009. Now it’s rumored Google is testing a new feature which would give social recommendations on search returns. Below the return, there would be a notification that someone shared that link on Twitter. Interestingly, the recommendation doesn’t necessarily come from someone you follow Twitter, it can also come from someone that follows some of the same people as you do.

Well what does this mean for your school? It means the influence of your social network and the sharing you do with those networks will now affect your search engine rank. The number “Likes” you have on your Facebook Page and the number of times your content is Tweeted is more relevant and more tangible. Quite simply, your social currency is now more valuable.

You’re going to want to adapt your website content to reflect these changes. Make sure it’s easy for visitors to share, tweet, and like your content with buttons and plugins. Continue to promote your social sites aggressively and include Facebook and Twitter buttons on all of your marketing material. These social networks continue to growing exponentially, so it’s important that you get started today.

-Jenn