SEO

6 Reasons Search Your World Changes SEO Strategy

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has gone through a lot of changes over the years. Search Engines are like little toddlers, they need to be taught what is relevant and quality for searches. The goal of search engines is to provide the most relevant and best quality result to your search query. The task of SEO is to provide search engines with all the necessary triggers of relevancy and quality to teach them what to display in search results.

The basics of SEO consists both of on-site factors, like header tags and title tags, and off-site factors, like back-links and social triggers. Over the years the way we try to reach our goals with organic search has changed. And with the introduction of Google’s “Search Plus Your World,” there has been a shift in search results based on the Google+ social graph.

If you do not have a Google+ social media plan in place, now is the time to adapt one.

6 Reasons Search is Changing

Google+ information is being heavily displayed in search results. When you are logged into your Google account and perform a search, not only are you going to see the regular paid ads and the top ten search results, you are going to see Google+ results all over the page.

You will see the people that are in your circle along the top of the results page. You will see content from your circle’s feed showing in prime locations in search. Google+ is being displayed prominently and it will affect your traffic and potential conversion.

Google+ is in Search Results

Second, Google has made an aggressive change to the way search results are displayed. They have introduced a new results box called “People and Pages on Google+.” This is prominent and will grow in use. This will only display when logged into your account, but the power is obvious.

Facebook, at the time of this writing has about 800 million active users. Google has billions of users performing billions of searches each day. The amount of data available to Google is significantly greater than even Facebook.

Google is essentially personalizing your search results based on your social connections and the things that you have indicated are your interests. They are trying to learn what is most relevant to you and deliver the results that they believe you would want to view and your social connections help determine both relevancy and quality.

Google+ Adoption is Growing

Facebook has spent a great deal of energy and effort becoming the center of the social graph. They have built an enormous amount of equity in “owning” the social space. Google is making an effort to dislodge Facebook from that position because of the power of search. Google+ is still a young social media platform. At the time of this writing, it has about 60 million users. It will reach 100 million by the end of 2012 and begin to grow at steady rate.

I don’t know about you, but when people perform a search using one of my primary keywords, showing up in organic search is good, but showing up in “People and Pages on Google+” would be great! It is in a better position for clicks and gives me an opportunity to connect better with potential customers or users.

Enriching Result Snippets

The rich snippets that are being included in the markup will have impact in click through rates and impressions. You now have images, icons of people in your circle, brands that you follow being displayed in the search result under a listing. It is adding an element of social proof that search results have missed.

We will be more likely to click on links that people we know and follow have +1ed or shared on their stream than a link with no social proof. Google is counting on these triggers. These are the things that help provide them with better information that leads to better search results for its customers, you and me!

Social Triggers and Proof Matter

The current trend in search is to be biased toward social triggers and social proof. The search algorithm is designed to deliver the most important content to its users. The problem is that these mathematical formulas are missing a key ingredient, human behavior. They are not able to understand and predict human behavior in a reliable, systematic way. By incorporating the social element from Google+, they are able to utilize this data to help filter irrelevant and low quality results and deliver high quality relevant results specific to the user.

Your search results will differ from my search results because our social graph is different. These triggers will impact the way Google delivers results. Search becomes more personal.

SEO is Changing with Social

The impact of Google’s “Search Plus Your World” is yet to be completely understood. It has already proven that is an important tool for online marketing and social marketing and it is now influencing SEO strategy. If you have not began to look at how Google+ can improve your web traffic, jump in while there is still room to learn, grow and master. Then you can become the authority that is showing for your keyword in the “People and Pages on Google+” results.

How Backlinks Are Significant?

According to a definition, a back link of a website is a link anywhere on the web that directs towards the particular website. Any website on the web is incomplete without back links. Even with the most relevant content, a website’s credibility is still under question without quality back links. Search engines especially Google calculates the relevance of a site on the web according to the number of quality back links. So if you own a website, it is most important for you to understand the value of back links and apply while optimizing your website.

Almost every website that expects regular visitors rely on what we call Search Engine Optimization abbreviated as SEO. A search engine expects a website to build quality back links with time, which is a long process. In a search query, the content of the website is considered more relevant which has the maximum number of back links from relevant sources. For example if you own a website based on gadgets, quality back links will be the ones which come from other gadget websites. Search engines will depend upon the source website’s content to determine the quality of your website’s back link. So you should not just blindly aim on having the maximum number of back links from any website but look for relevance. Natural back links can be slowly built with time and maturity of your website on the web. This way it is a long process and this is why we need effective SEO for back links. But to manipulate search engines for back links is not fairly easy.

Back links hold a high value in search engine algorithms. Hence a lot of people try to influence search engines by manipulating the use of back links. But these tips and tricks lose their influence with time and the algorithms just get tougher. Among the most common techniques are link farms and back link bombing. Sometimes when you click somewhere on a webpage, it automatically opens a different webpage. You might wonder if you have mistakenly clicked on an advertisement. This is instead a hidden link which is actually a back link to a website. These are known as link farms. Back link bombing is actually a deliberate attempt to fake the credibility of a website. Suppose if someone has 5 different websites under the same IP and he/she interlinks them together to sneak in a few extra back links. All the websites may or may not have similar content but under the same IP they are usually caught. This is called back link bombing.

A search engine considers both inbound and outbound links of a website to calculate its credibility. You should always keep a check on all the websites that link back to yours to make the links effective. A tool that can help you with that is the Domain Stats Tool. You should also consider the Backlink Builder tool that can help you find websites which has a content theme similar to your website. Another tool that can help you build more effective hyperlinks is the Backlink Anchor Text Analysis Tool. Apply these tools for optimization and follow a fair and square method to enhance the quality and increase the visitors on your prestigious website.

About the author: Bethany is a blogger by profession. She loves writing on technology and luxury. She recently read an article about Green building and liked it a lot. Beside this she loves cars and dreams of owning one of the BMW cars.