"Social" SEO

In the "old days," getting a website ranked high on the search engines required a great deal of technical manipulation - keyword placement, meta tags, frequency, and a number of other factors. Striking the "correct" balance of all those factors became both an art and a science in and of itself, with a number of people making a full-time living from "tweaking" the websites of others to achieve high SERP (Search Engine Results Page) rankings.

Enter the "social" aspect of the internet, vis-a-vis MySpace, Facebook, Digg, Technorati - and of course, HubPages. Throw in a little YouTube and Google Video, and some Tagged for good measure, and the whole game changed practically overnight.

While actual website design, including keyword placement and frequency are certainly a major factor, they aren't the only factors taken into consideration by the search engines anymore. In fact, the search engines themselves have become amazing examples of artificial intelligence programming, with their own "learning" processes that enable them to refine their ranking processes based on what I call the "social factor."

The search engines now take into account a number of new attributes when assigning relevance to a web page in relationship to a given set of search terms, including the number of vistors/viewers/impressions, the number of relevant incoming and outgoing links, as well as the number and types of comments and "tags" on social bookmarking sites.

While originally created as an alternative to the search engines (perhaps because of a common perception that the search engines were being unfairly manipulated by "black hat" marketers), social bookmarking sites have actually enabled the search engines to provide results which are much more accurate and relevant .

The reason for this is that bookmarking sites tend to provide "social proof" - confirmation by living human beings that the site contains relevant information according to the tags and keywords they independently assign to it. The programmers of the search engines quickly recognized this, and have accordingly assigned "weight" to "social" affirmations of sites in the bookmarking communities.

But even as this is written, there are machinations underway to "cheat" this system using "black hat" techniques, although by its very nature, this will be a much more difficult nut to crack than the "good old days" of simple keyword manipulation and dedicated server farms to generate "link love" artificially. And of course, once the "system" is compromised by the "black hat" folks, it will adapt and change once again to meet the original purpose the search engines were originally designed to perform - to help real live people find what they're looking for.