A very brief history of search
Search was once about keywords…lots of keywords. Meta tags mattered, density mattered.
Search evolved and got smarter. It began to be more about where the keywords were used in the page, what sites linked to the page and whether that linking site was considered valuable, inbound links mattered, page rank mattered. This is where Google found its strength.
Today
Search continues to evolve towards predicting what we want based on past behavior. Search engines now adjust for those that seek to game the algorithm by making search more personalized. These new factors must be taken into consideration if the algorithms are going to get smarter at predicting what we want.
Google now lets me choose from sites that I want to see results from more frequently such as Rotten Tomatoes for movie reviews.
Results aren’t just limited to the 10 links on a white page, we now get videos, blogs and tweets. Image results pull from Flickr as well as webpages. Socially submitted data is being aggregated into results as search engines move forward. Search and Social are beginning to overlap.
What does this mean?
This means that ranking is becoming less meaningful as what you see as #1 may be different from what I see as #1. SEO is not flat and it doesn’t scale quite the same as it used to. My social graph influences my search rankings. Google for instance now has a social search filter that allows you to see what people in your social graph have said relative to your search query, in addition to showing at the bottom of your search results. When you link your social profiles to Google it allows Google to return results from your Twitter network and their blogs. The more frequently you can be mentioned, tagged or shared on the social web, the more frequently you can populate the results of someone’s social graph and be seen in the results of someone with a social profile.
All of this became a necessity for search engines as people have started turning to their social networks for information, often called soft searching. Twitter search is growing in search volume, YouTube is right behind Google as the #2 search engine and Bing has started calling itself a “decision engine,” a term I think is utterly stupid, but obviously search is wearing new clothes.
Take this a step further.
As people participate in social networks at an ever-increasing rate, the importance of creating content for the participatory web grows at the same rate. No longer is optimizing your site or search sufficient. Search optimizing your YouTube titles and tags, your Twitter posts, your blog posts also provide opportunities for impressions. If Google is going to return results that include YouTube videos 39% of the time, in addition to Tweets and blogs, doesn’t it make sense to add those elements to your interactive marketing mix?
The results are fairly conclusive too. A recent webinar I attended by Hubspot showed staggering results regarding the difference between companies that blogged vs those that don’t.
Is your company thinking beyond Google SEO? Is your company creating content on social sites? Have you even thought about how Twitter, Video sites, LinkedIn and other social sites impact your site traffic and search rankings?