There are are a lot of changes being made on an almost daily basis to the algorithms that Google uses to determine what search results they show, but one of the most important factors these days in SEO today is social signals. 

Social signals and SEO are one and the same thing, although sometimes people put social media marketing in a different category to search engine optimization. 

For years, many people had the false asumption that just because the links from sites like Facebook and Twitter were no follow, that meant that they had no effect on ranking, but Google was behind that thinking, as they wanted to discourage spammers trying to beat their algorithms. 

They have recently made it quite clear that they will be paying close attention to social signals to determine rankings, but have kept a bit quiet about exactly what they are looking for. 

The idea is simple, if a website is really popular and beneficial, it will not only have a low bounce rate, (meaning the time people spend on the page, and whether they continue through the site), but people will also share it with their friends on social sites. They will tweet it, stumble it, like it, digg it or perhaps write a blog post or article about it. 

Large PR back links are not as important as they once were, as page rank is a very old Google algorithm that has long since been replaced by more important things to do with quality, relevance, and authority. 

Is There Proof That Social Signals And SEO Are Linked?

The only proof you need is that Google says they are, although that doesn't mean they don't have a counter algorithm if too many links start showing up too soon after a website is made. 

The most important thing to get right is the content on the page, such as having a title that has a chance of competing for a popular search, and the right keyword density, etc. 

However, when it comes to off-page optimization, the key is not volume, but quality, and even more important than quality is a mixture of quality, low quality, and completely random link text from everywhere that counts. 

The idea is to convince Google that regular people are talking about your site because they like it, and for no other reason. 

You can make back links yourself, and Google expects that you will do this, but it's no good to just churn out thousands of spam links, it has to be quality, and other people need to do it as well, on their social accounts and blogs, so it looks like it would with any big site that people liked, and were talking about. 

You can do guest posts, or hire someone to write a review of your site on their blog, although social sharing makes the most sense of any of these methods, as people spend more time on Facebook than they do on any other site by a long way. 

If you get a thousand different people to tweet your site, share it with their friends on Facebook, stumble it, etc, it not only gets a lot of traffic, it helps your rankings, and when one page appears on many different social accounts, it gets even more back links from sites like Social Whale, Favit, and TweetMeMe, which specialize in showing the trends on Twitter and other social sites. 

Social signals and social media optimization are as important in search engine optimization as they ever were, and will probably continue to become more important, so it is not a matter of SEO vs SMO, the two are part of the same thing. For more information about social promotion, check out my other articles.