Ranking vs. Social Networking - Which Is Best To Focus On?

December 19, 2008

In the past if you wanted people to visit your blog, it was all about keyphrase SEO. If you had a blog about ‘floral design’, then that meant you needed to find ways to get the top results on Google for keywords relating to floral design. The landscape for SEO is changing, but how much of a change is actually occuring?

If you listen to the SEO experts around the internet, then you’ll find that most are starting to see the shift happening in the world of SEO. Looking into the past of SEO, it used to be a very dog-eat-dog system. It was a battle to try and obtain top results in certain keyword phrases. Bruce Clay, an expert in the field of SEO actually made the statement, “Ranking Is Dead”

Matt Cutts, followed up on the statement. He didn’t completely agree that ranking is dead but that it’s less important than it once was.

So, if ranking is going to be falling off in terms of importance what’s going to take its place. Matt Cutts emphasizes that localization, and personalization are the future of SEO. What does that really mean in the grand scheme of things, and what can you do to stay ahead of the curve?

Universal search is now becoming more and more important. Having quality content, in terms of images and videos are becoming power players in getting your site noticed.

As we go into the future of SEO, I believe we can look to social networking for increasing page views. If localization, and personalization are going to be the key factors of SEO in the future, then I see no way other than social networking for this to take off.

I think the two nouns you could use in a description for social networking is localization, and customization. Social Networking is about branching out, and letting people become a part of your community. Whether that’s through a Facebook profile, or a portal to your blog is up to you. I think that’s what makes Social Networking a bright future for improving SEO. It broadens the landscape of what can be considered smart ‘SEO Practices’.

It’s not a great idea to give up on keyword ranking at the moment. It is definitely a smart idea to start investing a large amount of your time in social networking. If you’re annoyed by places like Facebook, MySpace, then there are other more professional options out there to take advantage of.