Perhaps it’s because most people truly are good people (that’s another question all together), maybe people just like to look smart, more likely it’s because when you have a passion you want to share that passion.  But the bottom line may be even simpler: because we can!

We can share.  We can share information, knowledge, ideas, and anything else we can think to share.

So skipping ahead quite a bit in the evolution of the internet to today; Facebook and Twitter are the current best examples of this concept of sharing.

So what does all this have to do with SEO?  Search engines have always wanted to give their users (you doing a search) the best possible results.  They’ve always struggled (and are constantly tweaking) to figure out the optimal way to determine the VERY subjective decision of “best”.   What they have figured out is that they certainly aren’t the only one who should decide this answer, and maybe not even the best to decide.  We are.  And since we can’t tell Google directly what we like best – at least not every single one of us can, all at once; Google has figured out a way to get that answer without us telling them.  How?  By learning what we share.  What we find enough value in that we’re willing to risk our reputation as a trusted friend, colleague or family member to say – I like this, you may like it too.  Most of us don’t take this lightly.

What do we link to?  What do we post on Facebook?  What do we Tweet about?  What do we comment about on other’s blogs?  What blogs do we subscribe to?

So have I lost you again?  What does this have to do with SEO?

Everything.

As I sat in session after session on a variety of topics of best practices, tips and guidelines for better search marketing it was ultimately all SEO.  It was all to improve SEO.  Even if most people don’t recognize that.

Why do we work so hard to create great content?  So people will like it.  Why do we want them to like it? So they’ll share it.

Why do we tweet about our products, latest news and sales?  So people will know about it.  What will people do if they find something they like?  They’ll share it.

Why do we update our Facebook status – sometimes entirely too often?  Because we want to share with people.

Why do we do press releases?  So people will know about our latest news.  What do reporters do when they have noteworthy news – they share it – it’s their job.

Why do we do PPC?  So more people will come to our site – the more people that come to our site the more chances someone will share our site with someone else.

Why do we put Like, Tweet, Digg and Share This buttons on every page of our website?  Well, if you don’t know by now I’m done.

So for the last time: What does this have to do with SEO?  I think you’ve figured out.  If everything we do on our websites (even off our websites) is so people will share it and a hugely important factor (although obviously not everything – there is no SEO magic bullet) for search rankings is how popular we are, and that popularity is determined in large part by how often others share us, the math is simple.  It’s all about SEO.

Most times the snippit in a SERP is pulled from the meta description tag of the page when present.  This means the often-overlooked meta description tag has the potential to increase the click through rate of a website’s organic listings in search engines.  While this may not be a startling revelation to some SEO’s, the importance of this tag is too often dismissed by some.  This is likely due to the fact it is widely considered search algorithms to not equate meta descriptions into their rankings.  What this study has validated is that a compelling and informative description tag can drive more traffic to your site by enticing the user to click.  Since click through rates are thought to be a component of search engine algorithms, in a roundabout way the description tag might actually improve your site’s rankings.  An interesting next step for this study would be to analyze when the snippit uses the same keyphrase as the query how does that increase the click through rate?  How does it impact the user’s engagement with the snippit?  The study is translated in English and summarized at Dynamical.biz.

This week Google introduced new search features that will change the landscape of real-time, mobile and social search forever.  This is definitely the next step in the evolution of information access.

Now, when conducting a search on Google, you will see live updates, news headlines and blog posts seconds after they’ve been published on the web.  Google will rank the relevant results to show the most current returns on the search page.  As Google strives to achieve comprehensive relevance with their search results, they are enabling users to discover information as it is happening.

The search can be refined by selecting “latest results” on the options menu, providing a full page of live web content.  Searches can be paired down even further by filtering results to view platform specific content, like micro-blogs only.  Further, Google has added a “hot topics” feature to Google Trends that shows the topics with the highest amount of online conversation.  All of these enhanced search features are available on mobile devices as well.

Mobile search, specifically, has a few exciting additions that include the ability to search beyond just text.  Users can now enter their queries via voice, location and sight.  This brings me to Google Goggles, a visual search application that lets you search for objects using images from your camera phone.  This is perhaps their most ambitious release, as image recognition technology still has significant strides to make before it is perfected.  But very exciting, nonetheless!  For more on these mobile enhancements, visit the Google Mobile Blog.

Google says that they are relying on “more than a dozen new search technologies” to provide these real-time results.  For more on the algorithm, read here.  In addition to these technologies, Google has announced an impressive lineup of new partners: Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku, Identi.ca, and Twitter.  Though, even with all of these new partners, Google still has their work cut out for them if they plan to provide truly comprehensive real-time results.  This graph shows that there is still quite a bit of unaccounted real-time content to index (over 50%):

But what does this mean for marketers?  That depends.  Reputation management becomes a heightened issue as real-time content moves to the top of a results page, pushing corporate pages (home page, PR, newsletters etc.) to the bottom.  A company’s social persona now takes precedence, falling in line with what we’ve been saying since the dawn of social media: “your brand is not what you say it is, but what others say it is.”  This visibility empowers consumers, making brand conversation readily available by aggregating it across channels.  The outcome for brands could be good or bad depending on what is being said and the overall sentiment.  It is now up to marketers to find the most effective ways to mitigate negative conversation, in real-time!

Image Source: Manfrys, Spark Media Solutions