Today I noticed Google introducing results from my “social circle” into my organic search results. This is a big move towards personalized search from Google – which WILL affect the SEO world in the next couple years. This puts importance on social connections and content outposts.

Here you see “Results from people in your social circle”

When you click through you get an interesting result…

Filtered search results from your social circle!

What makes up your social circle?

If you have a Google Profile – then Google knows about your social outposts. It uses these outposts – like Twitter, FriendFeed, Google Reader, and others – to create your social graph and filter organic results by what your friends have blogged, shared, and linked to.

How does this change SEO? If it isn’t obvious – this move is away from traditional ranking by keywords and authority and into ranking by social proof. This means your content outposts and social connections will become increasingly important.

The future of SEO is changing. We’re moving towards a social proof model where your social graph will help determine the relevancy of results. SEO tactics will move away from keyword targeting towards building an expansive social graph. The standard SEO practice of link building will change – shared links will carry more weight than inbound links.

SEO is changing – are you ready? Traditional SEO tactics will remain unchanged and will still be important. Adding social into personalized results will just add another facet to our internet marketing strategies.

Do you have questions about Google social / personalized search? Let us know in the comments or jump into the forums!

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A video with Aaron Goldman about the future of search and social

[Can't View Video? Click Here]

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What affect will Google Caffeine have on your website?

Matt Cutts, from Google, explains…

How much of an impact will Caffeine have on results? Matt says there will, hopefully, not be a big difference. Google will integrate Caffeine slowly and take user feedback into consideration.

Matt says, “If we push forward as fast as we can, double down on innovation and try to do the best that we can, [and] do the right thing for users, everything else will work out.”

The crew at WebProNews talks to Matt…

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In cased you missed it – Google is prepping it’s new search engine “Caffeine”…

“For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.” – via Google Webmaster Blog

Well for us it means a loss of many of our top rankings because of the change in how keywords are ranked.

While Google hasn’t revealed any specific changes it’s easy to figure out that:

• The index has grown
• Big importance on real-time
• Longer keyword phrases
• Speed – it’s super fast

Check it out here http://www2.sandbox.google.com

How are your rankings affected? It may mean back to the drawing board for a lot of our sites :/ Let us know how this affects you in the comments and forum!

More on Google Caffeine

• Check out Mashable’s detailed test
• More discussion on FriendFeed

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Becoming a good “searcher” is key to being productive on the web. Whether you are doing research or trying to find a new vendor – it’s easy to get swallowed by the vastness that is Google search results. These techniques will shine some light on a productivity secret that we web gurus have coveted for years – the art of actually finding something on Google.

The other advantage to becoming a good “searcher” is that it helps you to understand how search engines work. Since SEO and Search Engine Marketing are such a huge part of an effective web strategy – knowing how to search will shed light on how you can optimize your site for the keywords that you are targeting.

via CommonCraft

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art of increasing a website’s visibility in search engine rankings by using various tactics including relevant keyword targeting. SEO is a cornerstone of an effective web strategy as it increases your “findability” on the web.

See Also: Search Engine Marketing, Keywords

Resources:

• Beginner’s Checklist for Learning SEO
• SEO Training
• SEO Tools
• Official Google SEO Starter Guide (PDF)

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