OK, so nobody can say we haven’t talked about this and that we haven’t tried to emphasise its importance to you and your internet business, but now the proof of how much effort you’ve been putting into the social networking area of your search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts will soon be evident.

Google’s Really Going Social

That’s because Google is putting more emphasis on social search results (it may be more accurate to refer to them as social recommendations), bringing them more to the forefront by actually listing them in their search results pages.

These results will be mixed in with the rest of the search results based on their relevance to the query submitted by the user and also taking into consideration the content from the user’s social graph. Results will also be dependent on which accounts the user has connected to their public profile on Google.

This represents a major change in Google’s philosophy, since social search results were previously only listed at the bottom of the page. Now they can appear anywhere in the results and a notation will appear alongside the results showing their origin, i.e. Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Twitter Firehose Makes Results More Comprehensive

In 2010 Google paid a lot of money for access to Twitter’s database of tweets (also known as the firehose) and is finally using that data to produce more comprehensive socially based results, meaning that links shared on Twitter may now be displayed as part of the search results.

Overall, it’s highly possible that, if someone is connected to you and your business publicly and decides to share a link, that may well appear in Google’s search results.

The More Connections The Better

The obvious takeaway from this (at least, we hope it’s obvious!) is that, if you haven’t done so already, you should be out there in social network land building a fan base and a following for your business. The more social connections that can be established between your business and social media networks the more search results may be displayed with references to your internet business.

We can’t emphasise enough the importance of establishing a presence for your internet business on the social media platforms from a search engine optimisation (SEO) standpoint, and, with Google’s latest initiative, that fact has become doubly important.

Check with a UK internet marketing consultant for help getting your business established on the social media networks to take full advantage of Google’s latest search initiatives.

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