Since those recent Panda algorithm updates, Google has definitely put a lot more effort into tracking Social Signals.

Indeed Google’s latest Penguin update has sent many websites search engine results using only backlinks under the radar completely, totally undiscoverable in the SERP’s.So the new question is, has Social Signal totally replaced backlinks as the new Google “vote”?

Believe it or not, Social Signals now influence more and more first page rankings on search engines. Google as well as Bing have begun tracking social signals in order to rank websites in search results. In other words, if your site is not visible in the top social networks, you may not get the best results out of your current SEO efforts.

First step is to find out where you currently stand in all this.

Now there are a couple of ways to do this

1. The most direct, but time consuming way is to login to your Google Analytics account and use their tools.
2. Our preferred method for our clients is to do it from within WordPress Dashboard using Social Metrics Pro.

Use Google Analytics

Test and improve your website with Content Experiments

With Content Experiments, site owners can create A/B/N experiments to measure how effectively different versions of a page get visitors to convert. Optimize towards the goals you have already defined in your Google Analytics account to learn which page design and content is most effective. Set up tests in your Google Analytics account under Experiments in the Content section. Learn more here

Learn who’s sharing your content with Social Reports Track backs

You publish your new web content, Google searches the web for pages that link to it, and then they build automated reports for you right within Google Analytics Social Reports. You can find it under the Social Sources report, and click on Activity Stream. Track backs help you learn which content gets shared, and keep track of conversations generated from those sites. Learn more here.

Create custom dashboards with the Easy Dashboard Library

Want to quickly build a dashboard for reporting across multiple profiles that is custom tailored to your business? Previously you’d have to learn the API, and decide how to integrate this data with a visualization library. Thanks to the Google Analytics Easy Dashboard Library, custom dashboards are now quick and require very little coding.

Social Metrics Pro

Social Metrics Pro is the much simpler way to do all this, and it will give you a quick snapshot of your current position immediately after installing. In fact these people are so generous they even have a free version that gives you a good taste and easy dashboard access.

Just go to your New plug-in  installer and use term “Social metrics” and they are first on list. Install and activate, et voila!

Make a social media plan of action.

If you really haven;t a clue what this is, then see my other blog post here:  Make your own social media marketing plan.

Then, you have to make it a serious effort to track your progress on a regular basis, we recommend at least weekly. Plan on doing it over maybe your first cup of coffee in the office on Tuesday (a quiet day for us here at Flying Monkey HQ!).

In our opinion, social media analytics are really not that complicated if you don;t let them be. using Social Metrics Pro gives you the information you need without unnecessarily complicating the whole deal. With Social Metrics Pro, simple, even if you are a complete noob at all this (get with the jargon Monkeys!).

This plug-in gives you the much needed insight into your online social presence across all the leading social networks. After you install the plugin, you will be able to track tweets (Twitter), likes (Facebook), +1s (Google +), stumbles (StumbleUpun), diggs (Digg) and LinkedIn shares (well… LinkedIn, duh!) for all your posts and pages. And possibly the biggest advantage is that you can do all this conveniently from your own WordPress Dashboard.

We all now know this about online marketing (well any marketing really) that unless you track and quantify your progress, you will not be able to refine, change and redirect your marketing efforts to the right place. This is exactly where the WordPress plugin Social Metrics Pro comes in.

We recommend that you use Social Metrics Pro to identify your most popular posts on the most relevant social networks. Chances are the first week or two you will find out which social networks work best for you, so you can concentrate on them (it’s where your clients/visitors are!) and which of your posts/pages are performing the best for your website.

You can sort and filter the data as you like it and how it makes sense for you. You then move onto performing custom search queries and you can analyse your posts and pages related to certain specific keywords.

It’s fairly self explanatory, like traffic lights; the posts and pages with the highest number of shares show up green. Posts with low social media activity show up amber and red (DUH!). Your job is to simply turn reds to greens using social media marketing techniques we already discussed in this course.

And if you are anything like us, then using this is also going to be a bit of fun! Seeing greens everywhere is just magic! When you have every post and page in green, you will also start to see magic happening to your website traffic. Increased traffic, more keywords ranked higher, better overall SEO/Google ranking and without a doubt more revenues and so on.

If you haven’t done already, go ahead and get your copy of Social Metrics Pro. Start turning the reds to greens and you will be thrilled with your results. Here’s wishing you all the very best with your social media endeavors.