We've covered this topic before in our trainings, but with the recent changes to Google we need to revisit this again.
Your organic ranking is determined by the information you have on your website and how your website has been shared with the world. Search Engine Optimization now includes a mix of different social networking signals in addition to how many times people link to your website.
In 2010, Bing developed a strong association with Facebook to help measure the popularity of shared websites. The shared websites were given some new weighted value in Bing's search results.
Google was much slower to adopt social networks into their organic ranking, but in late 2010 it was announced that Twitter would help determine ranking. In early 2011, Google further introduced methods to measure Facebook sharing on Business Pages and interactions between the friends of your Google Profile.
The result is that the SERPs are sometimes unexpected, and your specific ranking really can't be measured any more. If someone is searching for sapphire drop earrings, Google will quickly return a jewelry store who's product catalog was shared by a Facebook or Twitter friend instead of your non-social website. Then after the social signals are weighed, the next results will be standard organic results.
So how do you go about getting more shares to your website for the phrases you really want? It's simple actually; just write more.
If you want to have the phrase "sapphire drop earrings" trigger your website, you will first need to write a blog post about those earrings, or otherwise add a page to your website about them. Next, you have to share that page to Facebook and Twitter. If your link is of interest, your friends on Facebook will "Like" you shared link, and on Twitter they will re-tweet your post.
These Likes and Tweets will build up potential results for the SERP when someone searches for sapphire drop earrings.
Search queries are very specific. The page and social media shared links you get for those sapphire drop earrings will have absolutely no relevance to emerald drop earrings.
Any search phrase you want to rank for must first start with specific content on your website and continue with social media shares, links and Likes. After that, you need to follow through with the rest of your SEO strategies.
