When I decided to professionally reinvent myself as a credible resource on social media topics and tools as part of my job search, I knew that I had much to learn, and that one of my acknowledged weak areas was Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Though I had managed content for a couple of very highly-trafficked web sites on my company’s intranet, neither management nor I cared much about how easy – or difficult – it was for our customers to discover our content through organic search. We were a well-known destination site for intranet technology information. Without doing anything specific other than internal e-mail communications, we didn’t have much trouble getting a steady stream of visitors.
Of course, when you get outside the firewall, everything changes.
To get noticed (and indexed), you must regularly produce great content. And since social media content - including photos, videos, and blog posts – have become integrated into the Google and Yahoo!/Bing search algorithms, you must also ensure that you are also actively participating in those arenas.
I’ve been working on improving this blog’s SEO with some success. There’s more work to be done (isn’t there always?), but I feel comfortable with what’s needed to accomplish further improvement. It’s now a matter of lathering, rinsing, and repeating the process.
Last week Google announced the rollout of Caffeine, their new search engine index. Caffeine will impact SERPs by incorporating links to relevant content (news stories, blog or forum posts, etc.) more quickly after publication then was possible with the prior search index.
For me, this begged the question of what impact will Google Caffeine may have on existing SEO practices and SERP results for blogs. Immediately after the announcement, I sought the perspectives of some local SEO experts whose opinions I respect.
Jerod Morris, who operates the successful MidwestSportsFans blog responded: “[That's a] great question. Obviously things will be indexed more quickly and social media should have even bigger impact.”
Backing up Jerod’s viewpoint is Charles McKeever, co-owner of OpenSourceMarketer.com, who believes that with this change, Google “is bringing search closer to realtime, which means that fresh content will be even more important.”
One of the best initial reaction articles that I read on the topic was published by Derick Schaefer of Orangecast in a post on his company’s How to Blog blog (say that three times quickly).
Derick pointed out that with the release of Caffeine, Google has “raised the quality bar for both content and links.” He expressed concern that Caffeine may negatively impact blogs which “see a significant amount of their traffic from long tail search.”
He then advised bloggers to assess the impact of Caffeine on their Google Analytics results, and pointed to some free tools to help them (and by that I mean us) do so. I recommend reading the entire post to fully understand Derick’s perspective.
In the end, the most important thing to do is to produce content worth reading. Nothing you do in SEO is more important than providing value to your readers and/or customers.
But one constant in the world of Search Engine Optimization is that things change, and all content producers must adapt. Google Caffeine is but the latest, and there surely will be others.
David Swinney helps businesses implement social media strategies and plans in order to identify customers and their influencers, engage them in conversation, and leverage those connections to improve the bottom line.
As a technologist with a background in social media, corporate communications, technical and customer support, vendor relationship and project management, he is able to comfortably discuss various social media topics with managers, individual contributors, and just plain folks.
Contact David if you're looking for someone to create, build, and enhance your customer relationships using social media tools and technologies. 
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