Search and Social Media
What does it really take to win in today’s search landscape? SEO is much bigger than just onsite optimization. But what does the search landscape look like today? In a recent search illustrated release, Elliance depicts the many components of today’s search landscape. The infographic shows the almost 50/50 split of the importance placed on components of websites (i.e. site content, articles, blogs, news, images, video, RSS) and the workings of social communities (i.e. social bookmarking, networking, shopping, social sites) to achieve top rankings on the SERPS.
Social communities have created an powerful distribution channel. Today’s social communities are full of people like you and me. We rely on a participatory culture to find, sort , and share information. We share text, images, audio, and video by passing along links to friends within our social network. Links within the content that is being shared within communities are crawled by search engines to drive valuable traffic to your site. Now, it is important to mention that this concept is reliant upon the creation of useful and interesting content. Boring or non-engaging content does not have a viral effect. The important thing about social media is that it provides the arena to for sharing and creates an opportunity for building link popularity. This does not mean that it is ok to forget about onsite optimization! So make sure you remember the more traditional elements of search engine optimization when building your site and developing your useful and engaging content to be shared via social communities.
Check out search illustrated info-graphic from SearchEngineLand: Search World 2007- http://searchengineland.com/080610-082238.php