Google has been challenged over the last year by the generation of online users who now are more likely to spend time on Twitter, Facebook, Blogging networks or other social networking sites than on traditional sites and on search.
That’s bad for business – well at least Google’s business which is very much dependent on everyone operating through their search engine to get where they want to go on the web (and being the master advertising aggregation engine between searchers and those wishing to be “found”
So what are they doing about it?
First – we posted about Matt Cutts coming on and sharing some hints on how Google would begin to look more closely at social networking content in an attempt to take into account links to help rank authority for web content.
Then, earlier this week, we talked about a case study reported on SEOMoz seemingly proving that inbound links from Twitter (having some authority through re-tweets) helped rank one of their sites for a brand new keyword (very highly) within 24-hours – so yes Google seemingly is looking at high authority inbound links from social networking sites.
Now we see a post on the Official Google Blog, cross posted to the Social Web Blog (which gives you hint right there as to the merging of search and social networking) that tells us of greater integration between Google Search and Social Search Results (this started in 2009) to where if you are logged into your Google account and have asked to link various accounts together you will now see relevant search results mixed through wider web content.
So, in other words, if you had a friend on Facebook or had been following people on Twitter that have related content to what you are searching for, their social networking content will now show up mixed in with content search results.
From an internet marketing perspective, what does this mean for you?
Simply – the wider the social networking audience you have, the bigger the influence you have and the more focused your content – the better chance that in the future your content will end up appearing in front of those to whom it matters most meaning more free, relevant traffic for you.
So what should you do?
Get on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube – start a blog and post daily with relevant content to your target market, share those posts with your social network and spend some time dialoging with your social network sphere, this will get you more of a network, get you closer to your market, give you new content and product ideas and give you more content that will increasingly show up on search results in the months to come.
