Taking over the Internet one site at a time
For many years the traditional way of making sure your website was seen all over the world was to make sure your site ranked well on Google.
By use of Back links, Page Rank and SEO, this set of techniques has become a black art known to a few gurus.
With the introduction of Google Caffeine update is this about to change?
How it started
In 1998, the year Google was founded no-one could have predicted the growth of the internet and the importance of companies like Google to all our lives.
Within a short period of time Google had indexed vast quantities of information and companies began to see the value of being included in the Google search results.
With so many websites listed, it became vital if you wanted to have visitors, you had to be listed on Google front page. From this moment the term SEO or Search Engine Optimisation was born.
Google gets tough
In the beginning before the majority of people used SEO it was easy to change the content of your pages so Google would rank them better. But as this technique became popular not only did it mean you had more competition for your website, but Google started looking at reducing the amount of ‘Spam’ on its results.
Since then the whole topic of SEO has been a movable feast, every time someone comes up with the next ‘killer’ SEO technique, everyone shortly gets on the band wagon and Google puts in new controls to stop it.
A new player
In 2003, a new website Myspace was created; this brought the promise of socialising with your friends on the net. Within a few years, due to its popularity sites like Facebook, Bebo and Twitter not only were created but due to their inherent viral nature were both popular and addictive.
It was not long before some large companies started leveraging these sites for free advertising and this has continued and grown year on year.
One possible future
Google’s vision had always been to provide you accurate search result on the terms you are looking for, and in August 2009 launched Google Caffeine. It latest update recognised that social networks now often contain the latest news, and due to the amount of contributors each social network has, the information will often be more accurate. In short Caffeine will give more weight to websites that have incoming links from social networks.
How will Caffeine affect the search market and SEO?
In the best light Caffeine will enable companies to get away from over-SEO on page copy and get back to a websites real function ‘information’. Caffeine will also reduce the impact of link farms and other traditional SEO techniques.
But most of all it will help to create social marketing companies that will manage your social networks profile and ‘brand awareness’.
Currently you can pay to have adverts display on Facebook, what would happen if you could buy Status updates to send to anyone?
Welcome to the next SEO war – Social network status updates
This article was written by Mark Excell of websitesbymark.co.uk