The Impact of Social Media on Search Rankings

SiteProNews:: "Over the past few years, the Internet has increasingly become a participatory social network where user-generated content is just as important as traditional advertising messages. This means your articles, blog posts, videos, podcasts, and other comments on the Web are now critical sources of information about your company, your products and services... Social media, therefore, becomes increasingly important to a Web site's success and its visibility in search engines...

With the advent of universal search by Google and others, search marketers and site owners will soon find it necessary to optimize their Web sites for a broad range of content types. This means creating content in every media and vertical niche applicable to your brand..."

This article summarizes the importance of a broad-media approach very well, highlighting the categories of: Search Personalization; Universal Search; Optimizing Podcasts; and Optimizing Google Base Data Feeds.

You don't want to necessarily implement content types or social media frameworks that aren't appropriate to your business, but be sure you are not overlooking a variety of options. And another trend is to NOT lock-up assets like PDF downloads and demos behind registration walls. Give a prospect all you have, if they are interested, they'll eventually wind up in your CRM database.

RockStartup.com from PayPerPost novel gimmick

PayPerPost has launched a web reality show. Here's the description: "Rockstartup is a whirlwind journey that captures the promise, the perils, the pride, the pressure, the pain and pitfalls of launching a web 2.0 company."

The shows, or ‘episodes’, are presented in a video podcast format. You can even subscribe to them from the iTunes music store podcast directory. The production values are OK, the soundtrack a bit painful. Overall definitely has the official reality TV show ‘feel’. So, as a designer, I’m watching them put up the tradeshow booth and thinking where are the scenes of working with the person who did the logo, huh?

When all the episodes are finally posted, it would be interesting to hold a back to back screening of the movie ‘Startup.com’. Let’s hope the endings will be a bit different – if not for the sake of payperpost – at least the “web 2.0” sector.

Here's the interesting part: I joined payperpost so I could get 'paid for this post' - which is I'm sure the desired goal of it all. But please note, I've set my pay per post earnings for this blog item to be dontated to Habitat for Humanity. In this way payperpost reminds me also a bit of squidoo, which allows you to earn money for blog content and either keep the proceeds or dontate them.