You Can't Ignore Social Media Forever - SEO is Going Social

With Google turning out their new Search Plus Your World algorythm online searches are getting more personal and more detailed than ever before. People are searching using detailed questions, needing answers and information. People are on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+ and every other social media out there and unfortunately if you want to be found online you can no longer turn a blind eye to the social side.

Google is picking up what others are doing socially and turning this into the top search results. No longer is your static page on your website you created five years ago going to get the same results as those that posted today and had feedback, comments, shared posts and tweets. This is where the information is at and if we don't keep up with it we quickly lose our online traction.

Google is returning images, videos, answers and active news posts that inform and quickly give us the results we need.  Google is also now indexing Facebook comments and this means that any visitor to that site can affect search rankings by commenting. "Quality, relevant comments and links may help boost a page’s ranking, but spam in Facebook Comments may also hurt rankings." - Inside Facebook

Here’s what this means to a website. Say you’ve just published a new market report for the Las Cruces real estate area, and of course you want people to find it when they do a related Google search:

• In the old search model, you pack the headline with keywords like “Las Cruces Real Estate Market Report″ so everyone searching Google for that phrase sees your story. A simple, one-size-fits-all solution.
• In the new model, Let's say Bob searched for this story but only because his friend shared it and promoted it, But Tom could instead see a different part of the story that his other friend shared and thus get different results. Example model by Poynter

I understand that you can't be everywhere at once and keeping up with one social media is time consuming enough. But I also don't want you to get stuck in just blogging. Once the blog is out there and it rolls off the front page you must have a way to bring people back, to draw questions and comments from them and to discuss and talk about it in social media circles otherwise Google will not find any importance in it and you're once again lost in cyber space.

"Those that ignore social media will become isolated, invisible and irrelevant to growing segments of digital audience." - Poynter

So what do you do?

Pick a couple social media and make sure you are promoting your information, blogs, listings, rates, ideas and personal opinions out there at least 3-4 times a week - more is better but not over 10 times a day otherwise people will start to unlike you or stop following.

Tell people what to do. Like my page - follow me - ask questions that you want answers to - and answer those that you can when you find them. Keep your business on the forefront but don't shove it in people face every time they see you.

Share other people's posts and let them know. They just may return the favor.

You may have to go kicking and screaming but it will make a difference if you keep at it.