Search Engine Marketing Specialist Dan Cristo

Social Media in SERPS Thanks to Universal Search?

I’m making a prediction. I’m predicting that Google has developed their “Friends Connect” service with the intention of using social media to change the search engine results pages (SERPS) as we know it!

I’m seeing at least two major changes.

1) Universal Search meets Social Media
The idea of universal search (the inclusion of different forms of media to Google’s search engine results pages) will soon include product recommendations based on what your friends think of the product. For example, say you’re searching for “coffee pots”, and a friend on Facebook purchased a coffee pot recently and wrote a review on telling how much they loved it. This review shows up in the SERPS with a little blurb like, “See what your friends had to say about ‘coffee pots’” and right there on the results page is your friends review.

2) Personalized Search will change.
Google is already tracking most peoples web history. It influences the way results are displayed for individuals based on past searching/surfing habits. Now image that your searching on a search term like, “king”… Google doesn’t know if you’re looking for a definition of the word, a list of past kings, the king of the jungle, “king of queens” television show, etc. Now if you’ve never searched for a term like this, Google can’t use your web history to help determine results. BUT what if Google knew who your friends were? What if Google could use social data to determine that you have 8 friends who are major Elvis lovers? Google would then assume that when you search for “king”, you might actually be looking for information about Elvis, and tailor your search results accordingly.

So there you have it. Two ways I predict social media will change the face of search results and in term search engine marketing.

Google’s Bringing Social Networking To The Masses

I was really impressed to learn about Google’s new Friend Connect product!

In short, friend connect is taking some cool things people do on social networks (upload photos, message friends, leave reviews, ratings, comments, etc) and is making them available for use on any web site. Now you might be thinking, “yeah, but I can already add that functionality through site add-on’s and widgets”. But what you can’t easily add is your FRIENDS! See, the exciting part is this, social networks like Facebook and MySpace are making their data accessible, so your friends can use your site as a social networking site, without having to recreate a new profile. Read the rest of this entry »

Search Engine Marketing with Social Media

Search Engine Marketing with Social Media

Let’s start from the beginning… What is social media?
To understand where social media is today, we need to understand how it started. Long before there were web sites (pre-1994/HTML), the Internet consisted of bulletin boards; the predecessor to the modern day forum. Bulletin boards were threaded discussions that people could post messages too.

After that we saw News Groups emerge. News groups were largely unregulated gatherings of people who shared common interests; such as Ford Mustangs or Gas Prices?. News groups were structured by keywords and sorted by dates, so visitors could view the most recent posts. Viewers also had the ability to respond to posts, much like the modern day forum or blog. One of the major differences between early news groups and modern forums were the lack of moderators. There was no one there to keep the posts on topic, or administer the group. The lack of regulation, coupled with the openness for anyone to contribute resulted in a lot of lengthy, heated arguments between users. Read the rest of this entry »