Slides from the Raleigh SEO Meetup where we looked at how social media is influencing search

1. Is Social Media Taking Over Search? June 2011 Phil Buckley SEO – What You Need To Know Meetup Group Twitter: @1918

2. Active

5. What is the heart of the social revolution? Sharing

6. Sharing is bigger than fans, friends and followers. Sharing generates almost half of the traffic for websites and brands that is created by search — 10 percent of website visits come from sharing. Sharing also accounts for 31 percent of referral traffic. Sharing is about scale, not virality. Shared links are, on average, across all sharing channels, clicked on 4.9 times each, so content shared by large groups of people reach a wider audience than content passed along from others. Everyone who shares is an influencer if the subject is important to him or her. Instead of one person being universally influential on a wide range of topics, the study found that many people are influential on only one or two topics. Sharing is about moments of opportunity and relevance. The study proves that sharing is a viable marketing solution for reaching audiences when they are most receptive to a particular category of advertising, such as CPG, Business & Financial Services, or Consumer Electronics. The study focuses on ShareThis’ database of sharing activity for the month of March 2011 and includes a detailed analysis of more than 7 billion sharing signals across all major sharing channels, specifically looking at the sharing patterns of more than 300 million monthly users across the top 1,000 publisher websites of ShareThis.

7. What Social Signals Do Google & Bing Really Count? If an article is retweeted or referenced much in Twitter, do you count that as a signal outside of finding any non-nofollowed links that may naturally result from it? Do you try to calculate the authority of someone who tweets that might be assigned to their Twitter page. Do you try to “know,” if you will, who they are? Do you calculate whether a link should carry more weight depending on the person who tweets it? Do you track links shared within Facebook, either through personal walls or fan pages? Danny Sullivan runs the Search Engine Land website. He is considered one of the leading voices in the SEO community. His background as a reported has served him well while interviewing the big names in his space.

8. What is a search signal?

9. The number of unique cblocks with a link to a domain. The total number of unique IPs linking to the target's domain. The number of root domains with any pages linking to the root domain of the url. SEOmoz’s 2011 investigation into the search engine ranking factors using 132 industry experts and large scale data analysis.

10. SEOmoz’s 2011 investigation into the search engine ranking factors using 132 industry experts and large scale data analysis.

11. SEOmoz’s 2011 investigation into the search engine ranking factors using 132 industry experts and large scale data analysis.

12. SEOmoz’s 2011 investigation into the search engine ranking factors using 132 industry experts and large scale data analysis.

14. How consumable is your content? Good isn’t good enough anymore Make an emotional connection Become an authority Positive beats negative every time Usability matters Join the club and pay your dues

15. When you’re logged into Google

16. When you’re not logged into Google Geraldine has disappeared from the search results

17. It’s not just Twitter & Facebook

18. It’s not just Google

19. So what does all this mean? Encourage sharing in as many places as you can

20. Figure out when to share

21. Make your content worth searching for Only keep the great stuff, if it’s not great why are you bothering?

22. Expand your network