The kiddos are back to school, learning their reading, writing, and arithmetic. But just because your grade school days are behind you doesn’t mean you can’t learn a new equation. Here’s today’s lesson:

relevant content + social media = better search engine rankings

While conventional SEO is still an important component in helping search engines rank sites, social activity is quickly becoming a factor as well. Search engine companies continue to tweak their algorithms to make results more relevant for searchers. And one way to do that is by factoring in the content that other web users are sharing. How does it work? Some examples:

• Bing and Google now incorporate real-time results from social platforms like Twitter and Google+ into search results. In fact, SEOmoz.org’s Rand Fishkin did a series of experiments in July and found that social sharing dramatically boosted Google results for previously unindexed content.
• Bing incorporates Facebook data into personalized search results. If a searcher’s friend likes a page, that page shows more prominently in rankings. Likewise, Google’s +1 tailors results so that when a registered Google user adds a brand +1 to their account, the brand will appear higher in their search results.

For more information, check out Contently.com co-founder Shane Snow’s well-done explanation of How Social Media Affects Content Relevance in Search.

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