The Master Marketer BLOG

The Future of SEO – Melding with Social Media

Posted by Jeffrey Schmidt on Mon, Jul 30, 2012 @ 7 PM

When you're trying to do anything on the Internet, you have to keep an eye on the future. And, on the Internet, it seems like “the future” arrives every other week. Sometimes it's hard to even keep track of which future we're in, much less how to leverage it to grow your business!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), specifically, is always in flux. Because web technologies are always changing, and because the search engines are constantly updating their search algorithms, this isn't a stable field. You have to always keep up on trends in SEO and try to stay a step or two ahead of the game.

So, let's talk a bit about the likely next step in Search Engine Optimization evolution: melding with Social Media.
SEO and Social Media

SEO and Social Media: The Theory

Search engines, of course, are always trying to find ways to give visitors more accurate results, more closely-tailored to their own needs.

If there's one problem with search engines, overall, it's that they have to be extremely generalized. Page rankings are based on measures like “how many people are linking to this page.” There are internal rankings of the level of influence of different pages, which further influence rankings. In short, being popular on an Internet search engine basically means being popular on “The Internet.”

But what is most-loved by The Internet as an abstracted whole may not be terribly relevant to a housewife in Peoria looking for pet-care products.

So, the theory is, what if we merge social media with search engine optimization? What if a search engine could look at your own personal list of friends and acquaintances, their preferences, and your own web activity to try to produce results which are relevant to your life, rather than an average of the web usage of everyone?

Chocolate and Peanut Butter, or Chocolate and Steak?

Tell people about this idea, and you get very diverse responses. Some folks think it's a great idea. After all, that data is all available online anyway, so why not use it? Others get disturbed by the privacy implications, or are uncomfortable having their online lives analyzed in such clinical detail, even if it's ostensibly for their benefit.

The idea isn't universally acclaimed, but we're heading that way anyway. Google has already incorporated these features into its Google+ service, which is still steadily growing in users. And it's been consistently rumored that Facebook is interested in having its own search engine, to leverage their huge user information database.

So it seems likely we'll be experimenting with this for some time to come.

How Social SEO Might Change the Industry

Much of the impact of this shift on you will depend on the specifics of the algorithms used, but it would probably shake up the SEO industry considerably. Here are a few predictions:

•  Competing for social media followers would become among the biggest activities in online marketing.

•  Encouraging interaction among those followers would also be highly-regarded.

•  Keywords would be integrated more closely into social media activity, but very carefully to avoid alienating people.

•  Simply writing good website content wouldn't be enough; getting it shared socially and talked about would become paramount.

•  More websites would start narrowly targeting market niches, to encourage sharing among their target demos.

•  Extremely popular social users will likely be increasingly courted by companies seeking their “endorsement” and the host of social connections they'd bring.

Whatever shape this new future of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) holds, we need to keep talking about it so that it doesn't take us unawares.

How do you think a shift like this would change your marketing strategies?

Call DeepSky Marketing to find out how you can create profitable marketing strategies for your company. DeepSky Marketing is a company that provides businesses with profitable marketing systems and verifiable return on investment (ROI). To schedule a brief no-cost consultation call 707 823-3888.

Posted by Jeffrey Schmidt
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