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In this new age of
Social Media consideration, geographical personalization and web history
metrics all climbing their way up the importance ladder in search engine
algorithms Internet users are presented with a much more personalized and
relevant search experience. Out with the days of keyword-stuffing web-masters with aged url's dominating the top of search results. In with the days of your
site being on top because you have the most similarities in social media
circles, are just down the road from the searcher and have a similar site to
websites a user has visited before.
Old School SEO
The old rules of
thumb to get a website to the top of the search engines would be to maximize
on-page seo and accrue the quantity of authoritative in-bound links. If you
covered your bases with keyword rich and relevant content, a properly
structured website and had amassed the right kind of links from high page
ranking sources you could guarantee that Jim and Sally would both see your
website as #1 for a particular keyword. It's now much different than that. That
top spot and the order of the pages listed on a search engine results page can
and will vary from user to user depending on many more personalized variables.
From an end user point of view the logic in this is beautiful. Your search
results are tailored to YOU and your history of internet usage.
This has become
somewhat maddening for webmasters though. Any internet marketer who promises a
#1 position for a certain search term is completely full of shit or not yet
educated on these findings. It's impossible as each users search results are
becoming more and more personalized to them. Even the practice of keyword
monitoring needs to be scrutinized. This makes it tricky to prove the value of
search engine optimization work. I picture webmasters worldwide shaking in
their shorts wondering how they can justify their price tags now without being
able to honestly say that they got a site to rank 4 for EVERYONE with a
particular key-phrase.
Spreading your
Digital Footprint
I still believe in
all of the best practices for search engine optimization. I still believe in
building back links. These all still matter. There are just more things now to
consider when trying to grow your search engine presence. You need to blog. You
have to make a Facebook fan page. It's necessary to Tweet, to make videos for
YouTube, put your images on Flicker, create slides for Slide Share….on and on.
What’s happening
now is this. Someone makes a new web page. They will then go blog about it;
post it to their Facebook page, Tweet back to the blog post, put up some images
on Flicker about it and make a quick video for You-tube about it. Taking that
single bit of content and spreading it out to as many of the social media channels as possible.
There is nothing
inherently wrong with this practice. In fact someone really standing behind a
new product, service or post that they've created and wanting to promote it in
this way makes total sense. It's not an exorbitantly priced TV commercial, a
no-metrics-possible direct mail piece or a radio spot that people tend to not
be patient through anyway. It's all free (except for time of course) and will
more effectively reach your target audience than the old school way of
marketing.
The Social Gray Hat
Unfortunately, just
like the days of keyword stuffing, people are sometimes taking a less than
honest approach to harnessing this technique. They will produce utter crap then
automate spread their digital mess everywhere. Rinse and repeat. This is
digital littering in my opinion. It's still better if you want to create a buzz
or get some attention with social media to….dun dun dun…have something that
people would actually like!
A good rule of
thumb in my opinion is if you have to spend more time spreading your word
across all these channels than it would take to produce another piece of
equally important content then you should examine carefully how you should
spend your time. Market your one piece of content EVERYWHERE or have two
equally worthy pieces to spread about selectively.
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