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The Impact of Social Media on Search Rankings
By Susan Esparza (c) 2007

Over the past few years, the Internet has increasingly become a
participatory social network where user-generated content is
just as important as traditional advertising messages. This
means your articles, blog posts, videos, podcasts, and other
comments on the Web are now critical sources of information
about your company, your products and services. This phenomenon
has given consumers a voice and weakened the power formerly held
by advertising media. Social media, therefore, becomes
increasingly important to a Web site's success and its
visibility in search engines.

Not long ago, search engine optimization focused on fine-tuning
your on- and off-page Web site elements in order to achieve
better rankings in the search engines. While on-page elements
remain the fundamental building blocks of your SEO campaign, it
is no longer the entirety of the puzzle. With the rise of social
media, it is more important than ever to create and optimize
many different types of content in order to dominate the SERPs.
The increase in user-generated content, and implementation of
Google search personalization and universal search, has helped
bring this about.

Search Personalization

In personalized search, individual user search results are
reordered based on their previous search behavior and other
indicators. Pages can move up or down based on the influence of
a user's Google home page content, bookmarks, search history,
Web history, etc. While Google is the only search engine
currently adjusting rankings using personalization factors,
Yahoo and Ask have variations on this theme with MyWeb and
MyStuff.

Google's reasons for initiating search personalization are that
it delivers more relevant results and can reduce spam. Others
have challenged this rationale, stating that user interests are
not static and can vary by season, mood or other factors. It's
also difficult to know user intent based on click behavior, as
sometimes when people click on a link they'll immediately
realize this wasn't what they wanted and click off. Queries can
also be hit and miss, landing users on non-relevant sites which
would then be used in creating non-relevant future results for
that user.

Because of personalized search, optimization techniques will
change, requiring more intense multivariate analyses in the
competitor landscape since the leading competitors will vary as
the SERPs vary. This will affect analyses of competitor on-page
and off-page factors, especially keyword analysis. However, all
the basic optimization tactics remain important. Content, in
particular, must do a better job of telling search engines what
the page is about, and this will result in better rankings for
those able to do so.

Universal Search

With the advent of universal search by Google and others, search
marketers and site owners will soon find it necessary to
optimize their Web sites for a broad range of content types.
This means creating content in every media and vertical niche
applicable to your brand. Compelling, useful and widely
propagated content will create more search visibility and Web
site success.

Fresh content will bring repeat visitors and increase the odds
that other users and Web site owners will want to share your
content with their visitors, creating more backlinks. For most
brands, the benefit of encouraging social networking activities
is increased search visibility.

Search engine optimization techniques vary depending on the type
of content being optimized. We've written before about
optimizing content for Google image search, video search, news,
maps and blog search. Two other areas you can optimize content
for are podcasts and your Google Base data feeds.

Optimizing Podcasts

To create a podcast, you must record an audio file to be
uploaded to the Web. Once uploaded, users will be able to
download this rich media file and listen to it via an iPod or
some other media player.

Up until recently, multimedia search engines relied on metadata
to determine relevancy of rich media files. However, this was
insufficient for finding relevant podcasts because the average
podcast is 15 to 20 minutes long and has only 25 to 30 words
describing it.

Currently, speech recognition technology is used to determine
the relevancy of audio files. Speech recognition and extracting
podcast content is essential for indexing content and making it
findable by users. One way to do this is to play audio snippets
to determine the relevancy of the terms within a podcast.

When optimizing your podcast ensure your content is easily found
by promoting only one feed. Optimize the audio file, and then
optimize a landing page for each episode in addition to your
category page. Make your subscription information visible on
landing pages. Create valid feeds and validate them with a feed
validator tool such as FeedValidator.org (http://freevalidator.org/)
or the W3C Feed Validator (http://validator.w3.org/feed/).

Your podcast should have a unique, keyword-rich Title tag
explaining the subject matter. The landing page should contain a
link back to your Web site. The publication date is important.
This tag specifies the last time the feed was updated. Include
image tags if applicable.

Since iTunes does not redistribute, we recommend building a
separate feed for iTunes. You can promote with three separate
feeds, a media feed, a 2.0 feed and an iTunes feed. Include a
transcript or a summary of the podcast on the landing page,
depending on the podcast length. If it is brief, only a summary
reviewing the main points is necessary.

Optimizing Google Base Data Feeds

Google Base is a database where you can upload all kinds of
online and offline content for sale. Your items will include
labels and attributes to help describe the content you are
uploading, making it searchable for users. Attributes are the
words that describe the characteristics of your items. You can
enter multiple values separated by commas for any given
attribute. Labels are keywords that can be used to classify or
describe your item, such as products, services, and even a house
for sale.

The items you submit to Google Base will go in the Base
directory, and some items, depending on relevance, might also go
into the Google SERPs, Froogle or Google Maps. So the quality of
your data is important if you want it to be found far and wide.

Use Google Base custom attributes to optimize your feeds. Google
Base allows you to specify your own custom attributes, which
means you can include additional information about your items.
Unlimited custom attributes can be included in your
tab-delimited bulk upload file. Detailed descriptions can make
your items more relevant, getting them into the Google index and
other vertical databases, providing more opportunity for them to
be found.

Since many of those uploading their data feeds to Google Base
don't know about the custom attributes feature, you would gain
a significant advantage because your feeds will be more
successful than those of your competitors.

Another way to gain competitive advantage is to completely
automate your Google Base data feeds. By automating your feeds,
you ensure that the information uploaded to Google Base is
up-to-date and accurate.

Automate your Google Base data feed by connecting it directly
with your database with a process that pulls the most recent
data once a day, submitting a new bulk upload to Google Base on
a regular basis. Outsourcing this task takes about one day's
time for setup, and then it becomes automated. One resource for
such e-marketing services is Hudson's Horizons
(http://www.hudsonhorizons.com/Home.htm).

Though the fundamentals remain the same, search engine
optimization is an ever evolving industry, adapting as the
search landscape continues to change. It is now important to
create and optimize many different types of content to dominate
the SERPs. Optimizing your podcasts and Google Base data feeds
will go a long way toward expanding search visibility.
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Susan Esparza is the Senior Editor at Bruce Clay
(http://www.bruceclay.com/). She joined Bruce Clay in November
2004 and has written extensively for clients and internal
publications. She also knows where the knives and forks go in
a buffet line. The latter makes her invaluable to the Bruce Clay
organization.
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