How to Use Social Media on Your Way to Search Engine Stardom – The Social Score is Next

There was a paradigm-shifting blog post last year on SEOMoz entitled “Google + Bing Confirm that Twitter/Facebook Influence SEO” It reported that social influence, i.e. your level of interaction, content creation and several other factors that occur on social websites like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and others, impacts organic search results i.e. helps your content “float” towards the top of search engine queries for the keywords or key phrases you hope to be found for.

This new concept of Social Influence is catching on. Search companies like Google, in the business of providing the best search possible, like ways they can gauge the influence of content they index. Instead of pulling up content based on the most keywords or links similar to the query, they can filter out the more important content –that created by real influencers on the topic within the social internet. Businesses known as social ranking sites are compiling competitive rating systems with the ultimate goal of creating a number for influencers on particular topics. Ultimately, your number will be compared and contrasted to the numbers of other participants in the social sphere and count towards ratings that might be used for everything from ranking you on consumer sites like Amazon.com… to you and your businesses position in search engine rankings.

Why should you care? In the future it is probable that your social score will be available to everyone from banks to vendors. You will be able to learn things about the people you interview before you hire them and you better believe potential patients will look at it before deciding whether or not to patronize your business.

Remember when the most valuable currency on the internet was the domain name?

The social score is next.

The people involved early in the social internet will be the first to benefit. High social scores will be sought as will people who hold them. A corporation might seek out individuals with high social scores within their verticals with offers to promote products – a next-generation evolution of the Google Adsense concept.

The leader in calculating social influence, a website called Klout.com began integrating it’s “klout” ratings with data it compiled from Facebook in order to get a fuller picture of one’s efforts within the social sphere. It’s not done either – watch as they interface with LinkedIn, YouTube and a host of other popular social platforms to increase their influence as the leader in rating individuals social influence.

. . . and the first place “Klout” will be important is your search engine ranking. Tweets from the most authoritative tweeters are likely to make it to the top of search results first. How many people share the blog you post will count towards your total social score. Links shared by people with higher social scores will count more than links from those with lower scores. Keyword and key phrases placed in content, while important, will no longer be the gold standard in optimizing content. The biggest factor will be your participation in the important social suites, so I’m going to go out on a limb and try and coin a new phrase to live by in this strange new system – “Get Klout or you’re out.”

Sign up for Klout for free at http://www.klout.com To try it out, if you like the content I create on SEO or social media visit my profile http://klout.com/#/EyeInfo and give me “+K”, Klouts version of “props” or “credit” for the topics one creates content around. I in turn will give it back! For more information on how social media interaction influences your position in search check out my book Searchial Marketing by visiting http://www.searchialmarketing.com , email me at aglazier@youreyesite.com or connect on twitter @EyeInfo and I’ll be happy to talk to you.

This is a guest post by Alan Glazier, OD, FAAO. Alan Glazier, OD, FAAO

Dr. Alan Glazier is an optometrist and Founder/CEO of a large private optometric practice in the Rockville, Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC. He is CEO and Founder of Vision Solutions Technologies Inc, a company formed to research and develop Dr. Glazier’s invention LiquiLens Accommodating Intraocular lens for optical treatment of macular degeneration. January 1, 2007 Dr. Glazier boldly eliminated all traditional marketing in his practice in favor of social media and search engine optimization with tremendous success. Dr. Glazier is author of “Searchial Marketing: How Social Media Drives Search Optimization in Web 3.0. He is a frequent lecturer on social and new media and blogs professionally at SightNation.com and for Jobson’s “Click” e-Newsletter publication. He has been interviewed by Entrepreneur magazine, on Blog Talk Radio and by NetworkSolutions regarding his cutting edge use of social media. Dr. Glazier has been selected by the readers of Review of Optometric Business and Vision Monday as a “2011 Optometric Business Innovator” for his use of digital media. Dr. Glazier won the 2010 award for “Best Use of Twitter” awarded by the Northern Virginia Technology Council. His practice, Shady Grove Eye and Vision Care won runner up in the Small Business Tech Summit 2011 for their pioneering efforts in using social technologies to market their practice. Dr. Glazier is inventor on 4 issued patents and 9 pending patents in computer science and ophthalmology.