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.
It was a week where I was buried in client work, but some of the news I noticed was that Neil Patel from Pronet Advertising launched his own web site Quicksprout. I met Neil at the recent Elite Retreat in San Francisco, and Neil’s knowledge about social media sites like Digg is second to none.
Neil’s partner at Pronet is Cameron who recently launched his own web site. Both of these are on daily must-read list.
Two other sites I am enjoying is Seven Mile the blog of domain expert Frank Schilling. Frank is way ahead of the curve, and reading his blog is a great education. Another Frank Antonellis recently launched his SEO blog Seopranos.
Interesting take on the SES conference from Rohit and Kate Zimmerman. Now the SES conference had standing room only for many of its sessions, with the new social media track generating a lot of interest.
Since this was a search engine conference, most of the focus of social media was on driving large busts of traffic and generating large numbers of incoming links through link baiting.
Yes these tactics work, but social media optimization is so much more than that. As Rohit wrote:
While everyone has been focused on Google’s $3.1 billion acquisition of Doubleclick and what it means for the online advertising business, PepperJam CEO Kris Jones points out that the acquisition makes Google the largest SEM company in the US.
Doubleclick is the parent company of Performics who also happens to be one of the major players in the affiliate marketing space.
The Peformics/Google relationship opens up a while host of questions that the mainstream media (and government) have not picked up yet. In the coming days I am sure that more will be written about this, but kudos to Kris for being first with this story.
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A question that I hear sometimes is “Why should I concern myself with social media sites? I am ranked highly on Google. Isn’t that enough?
The answer simply is “NO.” It isn’t enough anymore. There are some compelling reasons why that I’ll go over.
Search is moving away from “web site” search to “digital search”. . Frederick Marckini, the founder of iProspect spoke recently at SEMNE.org (SEMNE is a search marketing organization in New England) and during his speech he made this comment:
“all media, all advertising, lead consumers to search …but not only at traditional “search engines…”
I had an interesting discussion with a client about my KFC post. The question that they asked was that if I had been working on reputation management with KFC, what would I have had them do differently?
It was a great question which eventually led to this post. When an event like rats in a restaurant happens, no amount of PR or reputation management will make the story go away. The situation happened, and what you are trying to do is mitigate the impact of negative press that you are receiving. In the KFC case, as a result of their inactivity, search engine result pages and social media sites like Technorati and YouTube are full of KFC and rats stories. These postings and files will live infamously online for years, impacting the public perception of KFC for years.
Todd Malicoat aka Stuntdbl has an interesting posting titled 7 Opportunities for “New School” SEO. Todd’s suggestions might say SEO, but four of them are very applicable to anyone interested in SMO.
1. Social media marketing
SMM is NOT social media manipulation - it is learning what social communities online are looking for and giving it to them… (…so hard that they BLEED)
To often SEO’s think that SMO is simply manipulation of social sites like Digg and MySpace. It is not that simple. The social netwoeking sites are all different, and to be successful with social media marketing you need to know the difference between MySapce and Bebo.
One of the questions that clients are always asking is how they can use social media optimization tactics and techniques to drive traffic to their web site. At Braveheart Design we have found that local search provides a great opportunity to web site owners to rise to the top of the search results page through social media tactics.
So I was not surprised to see that SuperPages.com has now introduced user-generated content into their site. As their press release pointed out:
This is a preview of
Using User Generated Content to Rank in Search Results
.
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The blogasphere is awash in 2007 predictions and Rohit Bhargava has an interesting one titled Top 7 Marketing Trends for 2007. In looking at marketing trends for the next twelve months, and specifically SMO, Rohit wrote:
Originally introduced just a few months ago, SMO has rapidly blossomed into a movement in the online marketing industry worldwide. Primarily being driven at the moment by those in the search marketing industry, in 2007 I suspect SMO will continue to get broader use from marketers interested in building traffic and buzz online, moving far beyond linking strategy and smart SEO into the marketing mainstream. Hooks to allow site visitors to easily share and bookmark content may become more commonplace than those ubiquitous “email a friend” links.
I am amazed at times that it has been a little less than four month since I launched this blog. Back in August Social Media Optimization (SMO) was a new concept from Rohit Bhargava and very few people were blogging about social media. Less than four months later every marketing and SEO trade show is guaranteed to have a panel or seminar on SMO.
Over the last four months I have managed to written 91 posts. Some of these posts I think have been pretty good and some were obviously written when I was under the influence of too little sleep or time. Of the posts I have written I think that these are my top ten posts of 2006:
