Organic Response

When people think about the best way for their website to be found online they typically say something like, “I want my website be ranked #1 on Google for terms x, y, and z.” An SEOs natural reaction is to set the expectation that there are no guarantees to be ranked #1, but if we can rank for those terms, and a host of other long tail terms, that we will discover through keyword research, your website will likely receive a significant amount of continuous qualified traffic that we can measure through onsite analytics. That’s all well and good, but there are a lot of questions that come to mind regarding the impact of search on your company that goes beyond the measurement of traffic from Google searches:

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I just returned from a 10 day vacation in Israel with my girlfriend.  While traveling I met a guy named Elazar Heim, who is a Product Manager for Sightix.  Sightix is a social search platform offered as a service for social networks that returns personalized relevant results to their users.  Google has been trying to improve the relevancy of search results via personalized search for a while now.  There is no question in my mind that this type of technology is the next step in the evolution of search.  As social networks become a ubiquitous feature of being on the internet, Sightix social search will become more practical.  Could Facebook’s implementation of this type of social search engine be the real Google Killer?  

I was surprised to see that a Squidoo lense for FriendFeed did not already exist, so I went ahead and created one. The lense is currently fairly basic. It has a brief description of what FriendFeed is, pulls in blog posts about FriendFeed from Google’s Blog Search, pulls in content from del.icio.us that is tagged with the keyword “friendfeed”, and finally has a list of all the social sharing sites with a short description that can be pulled into your friendfeed. I learned about some pretty cool social sites like Disqus, Tumblr, Jaiku, and Goodreads. Go check it out and tell me what you think. Definitely sign up for FriendFeed if you haven’t already.

Michael Arrington of Techcrunch has reported that Google will launch Friend Connect on Monday. Like Myspace’s Data Availability and Facebook Connect this will allow users to bring their social profiles, friend lists, and away messages with them as they visit different sites. The “walled gardens” of social networks are breaking down.  Social networks will become ubiquitous with launching your internet browser.  Who will be the first to provide the service that is most conducive to allowing this social internet to thrive? My money is on Google? What do you think?

I’m currently listing to the founder of the human edited search engine, Mahalo.com, at SES NY.  He started off by saying he thinks “white hat seo” is important, and his comment 3 years ago at SES San Jose about seo being bogus was actually only referring to “black hat seo”

Mahalo currently has 400 people working from home submitting pages to the Mahalo for money per page submitted.

He’s now talking about a pretty cool service on Mahalo that allows you to submit links (descriptions, tags, etcs…) to 12 different social sharing sites all at once.

Mahalo has a rather robust social network that allows users to build friends, and discover their likes and dislikes.

“The New PageRank” Calacanis believes, is an algorithm based on human trust…This appears to be built based on the human review process.

Good Reads…social networking for books.  You can import your reviews of books on Good Reads to the Mahalo search results…

Flickster…social networking for movies

One more thing…Mahalo content will be syndicated into Google search results… the future SERP is part engine & part human….

SEO people “stuck in short term think”…”more into the gaming of the system than the long term value”…”black hats are poluting the web” leads to consumers not trusting the internet…”create less pages, but make ones that are really a lot better.”