Social media marketing is becoming increasingly standard in online marketing campaigns due to its known ability to build website traffic and inbound links. Link-baiting, Digg-baiting, and submitting your site to social bookmarking sites has both short term and long term value. Nonetheless, social media marketing often gets criticized because its effects are sometimes only short-lived. Some common complaints about social media marketing are that it drives worthless traffic and none of the inbound links point to the homepage.

Despite all of the complaints there are about social media marketing, it can't be denied that it has a direct effect on SEO. Furthermore, major search engines are now using social voting systems to measure the quality of websites. Here are some points that express the ever-increasing influence of social media in SEO and online marketing at large.

Social Media Voting and User Views on the First Page of Google

Thanks to Google Universal Search, which blends results from the web, images, videos, blogs, and other areas, social media voting and user views are of increasing importance since they help content get on the first page of Google. Comments play an important role in getting videos ranked because they serve as reviews. So if your company puts out viral videos, you will get comments naturally, which will come to boost your site ranking.

Videos are not the only forms of media that get comments. Nowadays, an increasing number of sites are using comments as a way for visitors to provide feedback, communicate, and build community. Google and other search engines may consider quality comments on blogs and news sites when they measure the importance of different websites.

The Influence of Social Bookmarking on Search Results

Search engines can benefit from monitoring social bookmarking sites because doing so allows them to index sites faster, define and measure the quality of various sites, and index websites more deeply. Humans can bookmark new sites faster than search engine bots can even find them, allowing search engines to index websites more quickly. Furthermore, pages of a site that are bookmarked are often deep into sites and thus not easily linkable, meaning that search engines can index website more deeply by monitoring what's happening on social bookmarking sites.

When someone takes the time to bookmark a site, it usually is because the site is worthwhile. When a site has multiple bookmarks from a variety of different social bookmarking sites and by multiple users, it has more quality and relevance in the eyes of search engines. Similarly, the more votes that a page receives from multiple social voting sites, the higher the ranking it may have.

Implementing Social Media Marketing into Your Link-Building/Search Marketing Campaign

Social media marketing plays an essential role in search engine rankings due to its link-building power. Profile pages on social media sites often pass link juice and are highly indexed by search engines, especially when it comes to long tail keyword phrases. Netscape is the best social media site in terms of the link juice passed on. If you have a local business, you can improve your search engine visibility with reviews and ratings from Yahoo Local, City Search, and other services.

This is just the beginning when it comes to social media's influence on search engine ranking. While all of these theories may not currently be implemented into search engine algorithms, all signs point to the fact that search engines will take advantage of social media metrics in order to provide search results that are more relevant to the user.