Don't Wait To Get Socially Connected Online?
The Future of Your Small Business Depends On It.
It seems like only yesterday that web optimization was the big new thing.
People spent hours experimenting with search engines, to uncover the "black magic" behind Yahoo! and Google search results.
Dedicated developers and search engine optimization experts figured out precise formulas that made their web pages rank highly in search engine results.
If you wanted to show up on the first page of Google, you hired an SEO guru who would spend hours crafting spider-friendly content and generating back-links.
There Was One Small Glitch Though:
Google and Yahoo! constantly optimizing their algorithms to stay ahead of anyone gaming the system.
Gaming, by the way, is anything but a "natural".
Search engines spend billions each year perfecting their algorithms to get as close as possible to social hierarchies of human beings --- they want the most popular content on any given topic to rank highest when anyone searches for it.
So, it's safe to say, getting web pages ranked in search engines has evolved into a high-tech game of cat and mouse with billions of dollars on the line for the winners.
Guess What...?
Algorithm have once again changed.
Now, traditional search engine optimization methodology, like precise keyword and meta-tag copy, are increasingly less important.
Today, search results for an individual are more influenced by your online social connections and the connections of connections than they are by the number of back-links into competing web pages.
Why wouldn't it be the case? It's just taken a handful of years since the rise of social media for them to capture enough data tagged against social connections and make it meaningful to search engine algorithms.
Search algorithms, word data bases and tagging have become sci-fi advanced since social bookmarking and networking sites started streaming content feeds that were tagged to individual accounts holders.
What this did was establish a system for mapping social rank.
Social Sites Know Who's Publishing Content First...
... they also know who is sharing it with their social networks, in different niches, first --- the algorithms of individual social networking and bookmarking sites rank each member's influence, in terms of the effect each of us sharing content has on how far it gets distributed.
If Nevil Nobody shares an article and/or video in his bookmarking site or a social network feed, it goes nowhere.
Nevil has zero social influence in distributing content by sharing it.
Content he found because someone he follows shared it, he consumed, enjoyed it so therefor Tweeted, Liked, Updated, Bookmarked or Google +1'ed it with his personal endorsement, in so doing notifying people in his social network.
Nevil Has No Friends or They're all Bot Generated
Nevil either has no followers or those profiles seen to be following his Twitter feed or Facebook fan page were generated by robot to give the appearance that he has followers, but when push comes to shove, when he shares content it doesn't carry any weight.
Nevil has no social influence across new media.
On the other hand --- if an individual wielding social influence shares a video or blog post with an audience, it's enough to get hundreds of others (who have influence) to share it also -- and so on.
No 2 Googles Are Alike
It used to be the case that if you and I both searched Google for a phrase like "web designer".=, no matter where we were, we would be served a page of similar results, no matter what our differences in geography, professions or social orientation.
Not any more --- two people researching Google using the same keyword phrases to articulate a problem in a search will see vastly different search results for the same search phrase.
That's right, thanks to Google's diligence evolving their technology with the local, mobile and social web, we all get results that are specific to our unique requirements.
Search Engines Now Take Into Account:
- Your computer's IP address & mobile location (geo-coordinates)
- Frequently visited websites that Google flag against your computer or mobile device
- The amount of time you spend online
- Your social connections on platforms like Social Bookmarking sites, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn
- Who you follow on these sites
- Who follows you on these sites
- Who else consumes content you share in these sites
- The time stamp of different content (URL's) published, when you clicked on it, shared it and how many visits it received thereafter
Big Brother Aggregates Everything
Search engines don't need to index everything, they just need to aggregate all of the other user generated sites to see who's who in each of the zoos.
Remember:
- When we follow someone in a social site, our profile pages become linked.
- When we share a post, we add a link into our profile pages content feed.
- Wherever there are links, there are search spiders crawling information for their index, making the machines that much smarter.
- Every time we search Google who's learning most? Us or Google?
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