What Google did till now:

Google is very particular with its rules and will go to any extent to ensure that the ones not following are suffering enough. The websites swearing by SEO methods get benefits while the ones who are not listening to what Google wants and are moreover, following black hat SEO tricks are sure to get demoted in their search engine rankings. The search engine is well known for its sudden change in the pattern of optimizing websites and it seems like social media is going to be important for the websites if they want to be in the good books of Google. For Google is giving importance to Social Media Optimization (SMO).

Google becoming strict with its Panda update:

For those who still don’t agree to what have been given in the previous line, we have reasons to show that we are right. There were several content firms and websites which took pride in ranking higher in the Google search results, even with low quality content. Google have long silenced them with its Panda update. This algorithmic update brought about drastic changes in the SEO rules and have compelled all the webmasters to follow them. There have been steep drop in the ranking of several websites and most of them are still trying to recover.

Google trying to improve its social media platform Google+

Since the last year, it has been seen that the search engine is trying to add as many features as it can, to its Google+. It has been quite successful for Google+ now enjoys similar attention like Twitter and LinkedIn and is soon going to give stiff competition to the social media juggernaut, Facebook. There are certain features like the hangouts in G+, which enable private and group chats which aren’t so in other social media platforms.

Other evidences:

Also there have been surveys made which reveal the growing importance of the social media platform through the fact that social media signals are being more favored. The evidence of this is the acquisition of a social media analytics source, PostRank by Google. Also the search engine is preventing keyword data access to the users, which it earlier enabled. All these definitely tell us that Google is going to bring huge change and favor the social signals for websites over the traditional SEO perhaps.

What we can conclude:

Though it can never be clearly stated that traditional SEO is no more or is soon going to lose its importance. But it is that social media platform is going to gain a lot of importance for online businesses and whoever wishes to carve a niche on the World Wide Web. There are more than millions of users on these social networking sites and hence it is also profitable for the businesses to be active on this platform. With the help of these sites one can get in touch with his target audience. It is wise to take part in what Google advocates or else the search engine is going to give you trouble soon.