I've been telling everyone that will listen to grab a copy of The Filter Bubble by Eli Pariser because not only is it a real eye-opener, it is also the new SEO bible.

http://www.thefilterbubble.com/

Here is just one snippet from that domain's index page that I'd like to use for illustration:

In the market of personalization, data is currency.

Companies like Google and Acxiom track your clicks, purchases and likes, converting them into a personal profile they can then sell to targeted advertisers.

Up until now that profile has been fairly static. What online advertisers know about you – your location, gender, purchasing preferences, favorite news sources – doesn’t change much from day to day, let alone from hour to hour. Your profile is also largely based on (semi-)conscious choices – what you click on, like, etc. – and advertisers can only infer so much about your physical and emotional state.

But that may all change in the next year or two, according to Tim Ferris, one of a growing number of “Self-quantifiers.”

Like other entrepreneurs profiled in the Financial Times this month, Ferris uses gadgets and automated spreadsheets that can track our bodies’ biorhythms, including REM cycles, calorie intake, heartbeat, blood pressure, glucose levels and even vitamin deficiencies (just plunk a tracking device in your toilet bowl). Those data streams can then be combined to infer how stressed you are, when you’re drowsy and, increasingly, what mood you’re in.  It’s not about navel-gazing, though. Self-quantifiers hope to use the bio-feedback to manage attention spans at work, stress throughout the day, diet, and sleep habits. Their bio-signal patterns can also serve as red flags for oncoming illnesses.

Self-quantifying services could end up using fee-based revenue models, but more likely they’ll go the way of the cloud – offering free-ish services and making up their profits from selling data to advertisers. At least, that’s what Ferris predicts.

“I think, as soon as the next 12 or 24 months, that people will have to opt out of self-tracking, as opposed to opt in,” he says, “much like GPS and geo tagging,” a feature of smartphones that records users’ geographic location automatically for use in various consumer mobile applications.

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So we can see two things right off the bat.

#1. Its about PEOPLE doing tracked activities that determine relevancy. I use the term relevancy because as I've said many times in the past, Google/Bing et al, are not relevancy delivery machines, rather they are RELEVANT AD DELIVERY MACHINES.

 

#2. We can see that personalization being used as a determining factor of the SERPs is still primitive and obvious signals, such as the like, or thumbs up voting in social media has a huge impact on what a search engine decides to show i.e. SEO Needs Social Media, what to who and when, AND that it won't be primitive for long! It is only going to get  more invasive, more comprehensive over the next few months.

WHY? Because it makes money!  What people say and knowing who knows what they are talking about compared to people who usually don't, (like SEO's ;-), is the best way to know who to show what and when.

 

How do I know? Because when I decided to hitch my wagon to the social media star, I knew from info we'd all had going back as far as 2003 that search engines were using graphs and charts to identify where links originated from and with a pretty good educated guess of their purpose. It only got better to the point that now signing up for hundreds of fake twitter accounts and linking those to hundreds of fake Facebook profiles simply doesn't work well enough to justify the effort. Everything you create is being tracked and cached. So even though a year or so ago we were seeing some degree of success by building 20,000 followers on twitter, it was never all that good, never converted and brought in less and less stellar results each passing day.

 

What does work is getting people that the engine can trust in regards to a specific theme or keyword based on their history of searches AND COMMENTS IN THE SOCIAL MEDIA ARENA, to say the right thing about the right site. Finding those people thru research and engaging them is the key and puts the push into placements like nothing since the days of infoseek!

 

One of our wholesalers recently signed up and he is strong in a particular major target market. So we wanted to assist him in getting top 3 placements for target terms that would generate search traffic for terms like social media SEO, social media outsourcing, social media management, etc in his local market.

 

We wrote the post and optimized it much like we always have following basic on-site optimization. Then we started researching the blogs, forums, social networks and communities that were most likely going to have like-minded people as members. Then we refined the list even more by researching where we can interact with that community by adding value to their community. Putting THAT community's needs above our own because I learned long ago the more you give the more you get. So we always look for how we can add value before posting any link.

 

While that is going on, we grab a few traditional links that we know will help us in local searches, LINKS STILL MATTER! Then we get the local seo done . It may sound complicated but its really the same old thing EXCEPT we add the people talking to like minded people aspect to get them to link to us.

GETTING PEOPLE THAT YOU CANT CONTROL TO LINK TO YOU IS THE SECRET THAT MAKES IT WORK!

So we may have spent 6 hours setting it up and doing the research, then another 4 doing the actual promotion BUT once we posted it and promoted with MINIMAL inbound links from social and traditional ---

#2 IN LESS THAN 48 HOURS!
That is social media SEO magic! The good old days are back!

As long as you can offer something of value to a target demographic.

 

Peach Y'all

Bob Massa, CEO Search,King, LLC

Proud Parent of Blikini - the Social Media Management Machine

Social Media Marketing and SEO Magic!