Ever wondered how the social media graph may affect the search algorithms in the future?
I personally have, and its my view that Google is showing many signs that it is using the “social graph” more and more to influence its ranking algorithm.
Google recently introduced its new product, Google Buzz, which is incorporated into Gmail. Google Buzz is like twitter in that you can share what you are doing, share videos, images and links etc and generally provide your followers with status updates.
I have had a brief play, and I think it will be a big hit.
It’s my personal view that eventually users will move away from search engines. “What?” you say. “You must be mad mate!”. Well a little yes but let me explain.
The world has changed big time in recent years, not only how people interact online but also in terms of trust. Word-of-mouth has always been a great source of leads and information and I personally think this is the way the web is going. People will not be looking on Google or Bing or any other search engine for information. They will be asking their hundreds or thousands of connected followers that they have within the social sphere in order to find what they are looking for, or answers to questions they may have!
What do you think? I would love to hear your point of view. Feel free to send me a tweet, connect on facebook, mail me or leave a comment below.
So, you have a Twitter account, signed up to Facebook, registered with all the best social media bookmarking sites and are blogging like a maniac in order to get your site noticed.
But how can you track mentions, links and opportunities in order to interact with potential and existing customers via the social web?
Lucky for you, I decided to write this post to give you an idea of the kinds of tools that are available to not only monitor brand awareness on social media sites, but to also assist in your companies reputation management.
After sitting through yet another SEO webinar and reading more and more posts on the web in recent days, it has become very clear to me that there are a huge amount of new and experienced SEO’s out there who seem to be fixated on trying to reverse engineer the Google ranking algorithm.
Many of them spend hours writing about what they “believe” to be the case but have no substantial evidence to back up their claims. Just visit any SEO forum and you will find hundreds of threads created by people claiming that this is the best approach or this is the best method in building links. What is clear is that a lot of these people spend an awful lot of time hanging out in forums. What is it they say? “advice is the cheapest commodity around”. Everyone has some to share!
When it comes to measuring the effectiveness of your online marketing campaigns, there are many different KPI’s that can be used, with some providing better insights than others. Some people measure the number of inbound links and indexed pages with others using Google toolbar page rank and keyword rankings.
Historically, I have offered core organic SEO services to my clients. But in the new year I will most definitely be incorporating many extra marketing strategies into the mix. Not only is search changing in a big way, but also, the approach I take in order to market my clients services and products.
SEO is great for attracting new organic search traffic and visitors and myself and my clients have had much success, but alone It is not enough. In a changing online world of search a more holistic approach has to be adopted in order to make use of all the channels that are available to marketers.
With the recent introduction of personalised search, universal search and real time search, obtaining top 10 placement on Google is becoming harder and harder, and we all know that languishing on page 2 or more is of no use whatsoever. As Google butchers the results pages more and more, organic results are getting pushed further and further down the pecking order and lets face it, organic search results just don’t pay the bills for Google do they?
The web has become the numero uno when it comes to marketing your business. In the early years of the web it was relatively easy to promote your business and make lots of money. I would like to say its “easy” to make money today, but what with the global economic meltdown there is no doubt that there is a lot less money in circulation. Couple this with the fact that the web has become a lot more saturated with companies looking to take advantage of this “new medium” and you can see that things are a lot harder than they were in the past.
But saying that, there are still great opportunities to gain greater exposure for your business and yes, make money. The Internet is still the most cost effective way to make money and gain greater exposure. Don’t believe me? Think about Barack Obama and how he used inbound internet marketing to defeat Hilary Clinton who had a much bigger budget. All thanks to a great web strategy and something that we can all replicate.
