What are social signals?

Social signals refer to a webpage's collective shares, likes and overall social media visibility as perceived by search engines. These activities contribute to a page's organic search ranking and are seen as another form of citation, similar to backlinks.

A social signal is a measure of social media activity, such as a vote, share, or other engagement that a search engine might take into consideration as part of its ranking algorithms.

As with backlinks, social votes and shares can be interpreted as endorsements for brands and web content, in turn helping organic search rankings.

Social signals include:

Votes: Facebook likes, Google +1s, LinkedIn votes
Posts: Facebook, Wordpress, and Tumblr posts, Twitter tweets
Shares: Shares, reposts, and retweets Bookmarks: Social bookmarking on sites like Delicious and Diigo
Comments: Comments on posts and shares

Hi Friends,
A Social Signal is a signal derived from an act that is "engaging" from yourself and or your community I.E. getting likes, retweets, pinned etc. As well as actions that are in response to those or in other words how engaged you are with the community. Social signals are also increased by having social accounts with real verified, complete information as well as items like authorship, schema and dont forget Google plus (hint, hint) and more. The bottom line is engage with your community on a daily a basis with valuable, sharable information, from actual detailed social sites and you will be just fine.

Social signals refer to a webpage's collective shares, likes and overall social media visibility as perceived by search engines. These activities contribute to a page's organic search ranking and are seen as another form of citation, similar to backlinks.