Live Results + Caffeine = My Social Circle

I’ve been thinking about writing a post on Google Caffeine since Google announced their search engine upgrade back in August (and then again in November). Yes, there was a little hype - Matt Cutts, (a software engineer at Google – can you say nerd celebrity?) said it would be rolling out in early January 2010. This was big news in the SEO world. There was a lot of buzz and speculation. Mostly, SEOs were anxious about how this new upgrade would change the way we search.

Why was it such big news for SEO? Easy – Google Caffeine was going to revolutionize search by adding a live search component. Basically live search allows up to the minute announcements from Social Media sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, and news feeds. Interesting.

I started seeing live search results a few weeks ago. My first reaction was lukewarm as I was afraid that the organic search results would be diluted by a bunch of useless tweets. In fact, several industry experts speculated that adding the live search results would change the way people search.

How did they think it would change search? Consider this – A typical Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP) may contain all of these elements – sponsored listings, organic links, GoogleBase links, video links, news links and now social media links. That’s a pretty big page with lots of stuff on it!

What does this mean? Slowly, pages two and three may become more significant in search results. People will get used to clicking on “next results.” They will search deeper - similar to the way they search through images.

Fast Forward 3 Weeks

I noticed this when i was working on one of my new search engine optimization accounts – ICE-Qube.com. They make these fantastic emergency preparedness kits.

I was searching for “emergency survival kits” and this nice little image, description and link showed up from "My Social Circle" on the 1st page of Google. "My Social Circle" has the potential to turn search marketing upside down. Basically it could mean the more connected, the wider your social circle grows, the more we utilize social media – in this case Twitter – the more likely it is that we will be in Google’s 1st page of results. Wow, this is incredibly powerful stuff!!

ArcStone client Ice-Qube.com on 1st page of Google search.

If you weren’t on the social media bandwagon before, it’s time to rethink your strategy.

Incidentally, here comes my pitch - if you need help setting up a social media strategy, feel free to contact me. Yes, that’s a shameless plug.