About The Social Media Optimisation (SMO) of SEO

Diposting oleh dirman di 4:11:00 PM

Social Media Optimisation (SMO) of SEO

Joshua Berg kicked off the session by saying “Social signals provide a much better way of filtering out the noise and improving the quality of search results” and “this is a trend that will continue because it is a much better way of understanding what people really want, which is one of Google’s founding principles.”

Social media and search have grown up separately and Joshua is now predicting the marriage of social media and search, which Joshua calls the SMO of SEO.

These two have needed to come together to make information and knowledge more accessible to everyone which Joshua believes is what Google+ and authorship is designed to do. Google is doing more to understand the context of content which is know as semantic search.

Google Authorship

Mark Traphagen agreed that “as the social web emerges it provides a better set of signals about what is valuable on the web.” Mark then talked through the concept of Google authorship. He explained that the best content on the web is produced by real people. If content is meaningful, real people share it and it would be useful to be able to identify the author of the content, as whenever they write it is likely to be good content. This authorship could be used as a signal in search results.

Google authorship is a means of identifying an author; making a verified connection between them and their data; and tracking how people interact with that content. Google+ is the engine through which Google can achieve this identification verification and tracking. Google+ requires you to be a real person and you need to use a real photo, Google uses facial recognition software plus manual intervention to verify this. With Google+ you can link your profile to content anywhere on the web and to incentivise people to do this they are showing author photos next to search results.

Social signals and authority

There were a number of questions about what is a social signal. Signals include connections within Google+ and external connections. The number of plus ones or number of followers are also signals but Mark believes the key to authority is interactions with higher authority individuals.

The type of links that pass authority include shares, as these become a followed link. Thus if a high authority person shares your link that passes authority to you. If you get a plus mention in the Google+ posts of a higher authority person that will also pass authority to your profile.

Personalisation

Google and other search engines are moving in to the personalisation of search so that no two people necessarily see the same search results. This happens anyway but if you are logged into Google then your connections and other factors influence your search results. Thus you can influence the search results of your connections on Google+.

Why posting links can give you negative authority

Joshua explained that there are dangers in using Google+ like a bulletin, for example posting a news article every day where you provide an embedded link but don’t say much about the content. Where you do this in Google+, Joshua argues people tend to not interact with the posts. So repeatedly posting links can actually have a negative authority effect as the algorithm will see people posting outside links which people are not interacting with, thus it can’t be valuable content. Thus if you post links in many places and communities, you risk less interaction each time and risk getting negative authority feedback as a consequence.

On the positive side…

Google+ is different as it is actually easy to get noticed very quickly. You can identify people who are posting useful information, place them in influencer circles and start interacting with them in a helpful way. People start to see you are being helpful and becoming part of the community very naturally. The key is again to be helpful to people and add value, the same core lesson which Mark reiterates again and again.

Advice on posting

During the session someone asked if there is a correct way to post to a brand page and then to a personal page. Mark himself posts more to his personal profile than his brand page. He will republish it through his brand page but at a different time as many people will follow both. I think this is useful advice. You can change your settings so that posts you make to communities do not appear in your personal home stream and post to the community first and then post to your home stream at a later time. Mark also said you can post to your brand page first and then re-share from the brand page at a later time as that reinforces the brand.

Joshua used a number of terms including relate, captivate, arouse, enjoy, share, acknowledge and contribute. Joshua said though that engagement is key more than content, as if people do not engage with him in Google+ he doesn’t really care too much about the content. It is the engagement that makes the content interesting. You can see the full video below By Steve Rayson

source anderspink