By now everyone should understand that high visibility in the search engines as well as higher rankings is dependent on incoming links to your website or blog. What’s changing right now is the fact that incoming links are not the only part of the equation.

There are two ways that search engines can judge the popularity of your content:

  • Incoming links
  • Social buzz

Incoming links are easy to understand, the more “quality” links from relevant or theme centric sources, the better you will rank. The other part of the equation, social buzz, is a relatively new kid on the block.

Any search engine (or any person for that matter) can gauge the popularity of content by looking at the social popularity surrounding it. For example, you can easily go to Digg.com and see which stories rank the highest through votes (diggs). You can go to Delicious.com and see how many times certain content has been saved (bookmarked). This voting and saving can be tracked and is a good gauge to determine “human interest”. Gauging human interest is of high interest to search engines because their success or failure rests on it.

Anyways, long story short… There is value to generating a social buzz surrounding your content. Here are just a few benefits:

  • Higher search engine visibility through multiple listings under single key terms
  • Higher search engine rankings due to incoming links from other blogs/websites
  • Traffic from all the social buzz that leads to more of the above

We are also seeing evidence that Google is paying attention to a few core sites such as:

  • Reddit
  • Digg
  • Delicious
  • Furl
  • Facebook

We get this unconfirmed intel from the Google Shared Stuff project:

You can find out more about the Google Sharing Stuff Project here.

Now, from a technical SEO perspective, the value of generating social buzz surrounding content is a good move because the major benefit comes in the form on inbound links from others that find the content valuable.

In short … Generating social buzz lies at the very core of social media success. If you take everything else away, the ONE thing that causes success or failure in social media is the Social Buzz Factor.

The big question is…

“How do you generate social buzz and do it consistently for all your best content?”

This is the subject matter of a new blog series that begins with this post.

How do you generate social buzz for your content?

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Related Content:

Blog Commenting For One Way Links « Create A Blog Guides

How Do You Check For Incoming Links? | Direct Sales Web Marketing

Learn how to apply Social Media and SEO 2.0 to your business click here.

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