Google’s announcement last week that it was launching its Google Universal Search (GUS) interface once again has SEO’s running to see how this latest change impacts their rankings, and thus their traffic.
What GUS does in short is reduces the number of organic listings available on the home page. No longer is getting to the first page of Google good enough. Now you need to be in the top 5 or 6 positions as the rest will be taken by video and news.
As search for Chris Angel for example on Google brings up the following results. Notice the Metacafe videos that now occupy 3 of the top 5 positions.
Two of the other positions are taken by YouTube video, meaning that for web sites targeting Chris Angel, there are only 6 organic positions available on the first page of Google.
What has that to do with social media you ask? The answer is that a social media marketing campaign makes you less dependant on the search engines for traffic.
A broad based social marketing campaign might well include the largest social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook and Bebo. Social sites like Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Furl, BumpZee or Newsvine can all bring targeted traffic to your web site.
Niche social networking sites like Care2.com, qoolsqool, ScoreGuru and Stylehive all offer tremendous opportunities to drive traffic to your web site. Having a web site does not mean that you have to be dependant on one source of traffic (ie the search engines). A comprehensive social media marketing plan will drive qualified traffic to your site from a variety of sources, making you less dependant on one source like Google.
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Sterling 06.13.07 at 9:49 pm
It has baffled me for some time now that people spend so much time trying to optimize for the search engines even though they get slammed or ’slapped’ several times a year by the changing of algorithms.
I do some minor SEO stuff, but learning SMO or Social Media Optimization seems like the smart choice as the web 2.0 landscape continues to be dominated by being part of social communities.