Google recently introduced their new tool, Google SideWiki to create an annotated web browsing experience for any user willing to install the Google toolbar in their browser.  Operators of brand websites are no doubt going to be frustrated by the idea of user-generated content outside their control surrounding the user experience of their website.  However, there could be interesting opportunities here for marketers and tremendous advances for the consumer if the SideWiki adoption rate takes off.

For marketers, there may be interesting ways to engage your website audience in the effort to make your website more useful to other users:

• What if you post a new product and ask your users to sidewiki about it?
• What if you represent a cause and your users can sidewiki additional information that adds color to your campaign?
• What if you have an ecommerce site and users can sidewiki product recommendations or related products?
• What if you are a content hub and users can sidewiki links to your content on sites that relate to you thus creating new viral sources of traffic?

For consumers the immediate benefits are informational but the ultimate benefits could come if/when sidewiki goes social.  What if there comes a day when sidewiki uses Facebook Connect so that you can see sidewiki comments by your friends.  Everywhere you go on the web you will be surrounded by information generated by your own trusted network.  This is another step in the direction of what Charlene Li, the author of “Groundswell”, hints at when she says, “In the future, the social web will be in the air all around us.”

Right now the only way you can get the sidewiki app is by installing the toolbar. I think that one of the keys to rapid user adoption of sidewiki will be to un-marry the application from the Google toolbar.  There are already too many browser add-ons and many people choose not to add yet another row of buttons to their browser in favor of keeping their viewing area uncluttered.  If Google allows sidewiki to become a stand-alone free download that users can turn on and off as they choose I think the adoption rate will be dramatic.  What ideas do you have as to how you will use the sidewiki?

Every year SEOMoz puts out a great study of what factors top SEO experts believe to be most important in impacting your rankings.  Here is a link to this year’s study which puts a great deal of emphasis on the quality and variety of inbound links to your site.  As much as I value the information in a study like this, I’m struck by the fact that SEO experts still remain obsessed with the concept of how to drive people to a single site.  With all of the developments in social media content and services permeating the web we need to move away from our obsessions with our own site rankings and develop SEO models that are based on optimizing how we are found within the total search experience of the user.

What does this mean? It means you should put yourself in the searcher’s shoes. What is their experience like? What sorts of content, sites, services, dead-ends, confusions, or revelations do they encounter when they are searching for topics that relate to you? It may not matter much that your site ranks well for a given term if the search result pages are chock full of so many review sites, lead generations services, and aggregators that the searcher is more likely to be confused than engaged. Think about how searchers are likely to behave when faced with the options that search result pages present them with. How can you be present in those other options?

Here are some things to consider:

• Are there useful sites that aggregate data about businesses like yours that searchers are likely to encounter?  This is almost certain for most industries.  You need to focus attention on how you optimize your representation on these services.  Being listed is usually not enough to stand out when the searcher hits that service.
• What kinds of social content do searchers encounter (blogs, videos, forums, images, reviews etc.)?  How effectively are you represented in this content?
• What kind of content do they see if they search through maps or local search?  Businesses often pay less attention to these listings but the stats I have been seeing indicate that searchers are increasingly passing through these interfaces to get to you.
• What happens when people perform searches related to your services on non-search sites like YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter?  How can you create content that will be meaningful within the context of those sites (be interesting as opposed to promotional)?
• What other sites are embedding or making use of the portable, social content you are offering?  Can you work with them to help them make full use of all the content you have to offer?

Basically the issue here is that SEO practices have typically been focussed on your site instead of the searcher.  By including an appreciation of all the experiences that searchers are likely to encounter in your search optimization strategy, you can create a wider variety of key ways back to you than just your website’s listing on a search results page.  Search optimization programs that do not include this thinking are missing a big piece.

The term “inbound marketing” tends to bring together the tactics of search and social media under one umbrella.  To me the theme that binds them all together is that they reach people during the natural course of whatever they may be doing online rather than interrupting that process with “Hey pay attention to me now” messages.  So here is my argument for a way to look at search as a social media activity.

1.  “Isn’t search a personal act, not a social one?” First of all, not all social media activities have to include interaction with others.  Search is a fundamental way that users interact with the web.  That is the social activity of search.

2. “Doesn’t search marketing place paid ads in front of users?”   Yes but for the most part these messages are helpful tools that reach people while they are in the process of looking for them.  If I’m searching for tennis shoes and I see a search ad for a great pair then the ad is helping me and adding value to my interaction with the web.

3.  “Isn’t social media about two-way communications?”  Yes but search has always been and continues to be a very subtle form of two-way communication.  Attentive search marketers have always looked closely at what forms of content win the elusive clicks of their audience.  The user’s decision to click or not to click is, in itself, a social act that “votes” for that content.  since the search marketer studies this data and makes content decisions based on it, the user’s decisions result in action by the marketer.  This is the two-way communication.  Ok this argument may be weak because we do the same things with paid ads online.  However, increasingly, search results pages give us the tools to actually vote for the content that appears on them.   On Google users can comment on, promote, or delete each organic listing on every page.  This definitely qualifies as a social activity.

The reason I focus on creating these linkages between search and social media is because we are in the midst of a marketing and communications transformation that will de-emphasize (though not eliminate) interruption messaging while placing greater emphasis on how we weave or communications into the fabric of people’s daily lives in helpful, entertaining, and interesting ways.  Maybe it it is wrong to argue that search is social media marketing.  Maybe we need a bigger concept to refer to non-interrupive communication.  The conept of “inbound marketing” comes the closest of any that I have seen but perhaps you have an even better way of referring to this game-changing trend.

Google is now spidering Tweets and pulling them into search engine result pages (SERPs).  This means that if you Tweet for a specifc business reason and are concerned about your online visibility you will want to take some steps to make sure that your Tweets are optimized for organic search.  Here some tips to help you get Twoogled  (I’m going to keep making up new Twitter words):

• Your account name should be in-line with how you intend to be found.  “BestWidgets” would be better than “okeydokey134″ if you are seeking the elusive widget shopper online.
• Consider the title of each tweet.  Use keywords that align with your objectives.
• Be consistent in your use keywords in tweets.  Multiple instances of the same terms will improve your visibility.
• Choose the first 40 or so characters wisely.  When you Tweet appears in Google, the title will include about the first 42 characters of your Tweet.  This is similar to the care with which you would write page titles for website SEO.
• Be interesting.  Providing links to useful content that gets you retweeted will give your tweets a boost in search visibility.
• Write your bio with care.  Your Twitter bio should also contain the terms that matter to your search visibility.

In the future Google may split the real-time content like Tweets from the rest of the SERP.  For now, your Tweets are out there being spidered so it pays to be conscious of how they can help you be found.

Here is an interesting tool that analyzes the content of your website and reports back to you about what percentage of the content is self-focused or customer focused. It is not entirely accurate but is an intersting way of looking at your site that goes beyond typical SEO tools. I typed in two sites I know well and they both came back as 100% me-focused and 0% customer focussed.  Yikes!  That got my attention. How does yours turn out?

http://www.futurenowinc.com/wewe.htm

Inspired by the notion that many advertisers and marketers feel that they are held hostage by the constantly evolving paid and organic search landscape, an unnamed author has put forth the controversial idea the searh engines require government regulation. Before you whack me on the snout for suggesting such a thing, just give this a read. 
It makes interesting points, particularly about he lack of transparency in search engine algorithms.  Should the playing field be level and understood by all?  Not entirely a bad idea.
Click here to read the whole article

Because of the many ways that social media content impacts the experiences of online searchers, we tend to put more emphasis on that area in today’s search optimization strategies.  However, in this article by Michael Estrin, he documents several  traditional SEO strategies that make solid sense.  By paying attention to these principles in concert with an effective social media strategy you will see gains in your visibility via organic search.
Read the full article for the details but here is a summary of the ideas he discusses:

• Use Google’s webmaster tools to gain insight into how the engine views your site.
• Make sure that the text of links in your site use keywords that relate to the content of the page that they link to.
• Pay attention to wording of inbound links to your site wherever possible.
• Convert 404 errors to 301 redirects
• Create a 301 redirect for the non-www version of your url.
• Use the search engines to check that new pages of your site have been indexed.
• Pay attention to multiple search engines.
• Use the option of viewing the cached version of your site to see it in text format in order to get a better indication of what the search spiders see.
• Pay attention to the keyword focus of each page and keep it specific.
• Align title and description tags with the keyword focus of each page.
• Continue to find ways to develop relevant content.

There are more principles than this to bear in mind but Michael gives us a good start in the right direction and some solid reminders of some tactics that get overlooked or forgotten.