How The Search Engines Use Social Signals
Social signals are becoming more and more important in search, and I mean beyond Google simply counting and weighing the importance, relevance, and authority of links.
For instance, if you are logged into Facebook, you can go to Bing and see what your Facebook friends like. On YouTube, or anywhere.
Google, in an attempt to face off with Bing, created its own social network called Google+. When you conduct a Google search, beside each search result you’ll see a +1 button. If you +1 an item and you set your preferences on Google+ just right, then your friends will be able to see what you plussed on your Google+ profile page, and you they.
But Google takes it another step further than that even. On the search results page, you can see what items your friends have shared on Google+ and you can see other items they have shared on any social network – including Facebook.
Are these social signals exhaustive? Not by any means. In fact, they are just the beginning.
Social search is in its infant stage. I believe social signals in search will become much more important and we are only getting started. It will be exciting to see where the search engines of the future will take us. I can hardly wait to get there.
Is SEO Still Important?
An article on WebProNews asks a very important question: “Has SEO Peaked?”
Of course, this is a question that gets asked once or twice a year. And I’m pretty sure the answer is always the same. Chris Crum concludes that it is still important, but it’s changing. Yep, I say. It’s changing alright. And there’s nothing we can do about it.
One of the ways in which SEO is changing is the way in which people are searching for information. It seems that more and more searchers are using social search instead of traditional search. Unfortunately, social search is something that Google hasn’t really excelled at. Which means that many webmasters are going to find that their biggest referrer is not Google. It could be something else.
In fact, the article goes on to say that the biggest source of web traffic for a lot of websites will be where they spend most of their attention – search engines or social media. That makes sense.
If you start seeing the majority of your web traffic coming from Twitter, it could be because you spend a lot of time on Twitter. If you start seeing it coming from Bing, then maybe it’s because you spend a lot of time optimizing for Bing traffic. So what’s the lesson here?
There’s no real lesson. It may be a cause of celebration. Website owners no longer need to feel tethered to Google. Then again, it may mean SEO is just a little bit more difficult.
Should We Be Getting Excited About Social Search?
Google’s latest changes to organic search will have a lot of marketers rubbing their hands with glee. I think a word of caution is in order, however, as I don’t think it’s going to have as big an impact as many theorize. Google has had a penchant in recent months of introducing features to search that rely on people having Google accounts. Not just having accounts, but also being logged into those accounts.
The latest little offering is the introduction of social search data into organic search. Up until now, this information has been available at the bottom of any set of organic search results. They will now appear within the search results themselves. There is a theory that this data will effect search results by boosting content that has been ‘liked’ or ‘tweeted’ by your friends on various social media sites.
Why shouldn’t you get excited about this new change to Google’s search results? Because of the limitation of it’s use (that is, only available to logged-in Google account holders), it is not going to achieve any significant changes in how your pages will rank. If anything, it could have a negative effect. Spammers jump on every little change like this in an attempt to lift their pages a place or two in search results.
At present, the ideal situation is one where anyone searching for information in your niche either doesn’t have a Google account, or isn’t logged in. Their search results will be unaffected by any spam data. Of course, if your site is an extremely popular one and you have a lot of followers who do ‘like’ or ‘retweet’ your content, then you may see some gains in traffic. At present, the gain is not going to be significant enough to race out and start a social media campaign to increase your followers.
Will Social Search Change Search Engine Marketing?
Search engine marketing has been going strong for a few years now. Social search is just getting off the ground. In fact, Google has made it a point to tackle social search and lead the charge. Only, there are some people who aren’t so impressed with how they’re doing it.
But let’s say that social search were a perfect animal – like organic search (I’m kidding, OK?).
At any rate, let’s just say that social search was at least as good as organic search has been when at its best. Would search engine marketing be any different? Would social search change the nature of search engine marketing? I’m betting it would.
Remember, there are two branches of SEM: Paid search and organic search. How would each of these change with social search? My guess is that each would change in a real sense, but not necessarily in a fundamental sense.
Here’s what I mean: PPC is based in large part on the principles of organic search. You do your keyword research, write a few targeted ads, and watch your rankings based on search engine ranking factors. Social search, however, isn’t anything like that. You still might do your keyword research, but you aren’t so much concerned with rankings. You are concerned with connections. So how will that change search engine marketing?
I think one very important way that search engine marketing will change when social search reaches full maturity is that brands will no longer need to feel threatened by lesser companies who are better at SEO. Brands can actually put more emphasis on their company culture and focus on the benefits of doing business. That’s as it should be.