Over the years, consultants and SEO firms have worked hard to improve organic search results for their clients. With the emergence of social media the landscape again changed and search became for lack of a better term, “social”. There are two types of social search emerging – general and real-time. We cover the most popular tool in each area – Google Social Search and Twitter Search.

General Social Search with Google Social Search

Google has put together their Google Profile site and has enabled Social Search. According to its blog, “Google finds relevant public content from your friends and contacts and highlights it for you at the bottom of your search results. When I do a simple query for [new york], Google Social Search includes my friend’s blog on the results page under the heading “Results from people in your social circle for New York.” I can also filter my results to see only content from my social circle by clicking “Show options” on the results page and clicking “Social.”"

This is a great explanation of Google Social Search from their blog:

Their blog goes on to say “all the information that appears as part of Google Social Search is published publicly on the web — you can find it without Social Search if you really want to. What we’ve done is surface that content together in one single place to make your results more relevant. The way we do it is by building a social circle of your friends and contacts using the connections linked from your public Google profile, such as the people you’re following on Twitter or FriendFeed. The results are specific to you, so you need to be signed in to your Google Account to use Social Search. If you use Gmail, we’ll also include your chat buddies and contacts in your friends, family, and coworkers groups. And if you use Google Reader, we’ll include some websites from your subscriptions as part of your social search results.”

Real-Time Social Search with Twitter Search

2009 has seen the explosion of Twitter as the hot tool of the year and it was even voted the best new word of the year. One of the most important parts of the site and what makes it extremely useful is its Twitter Search site. As you can see in the image below that it is a simple and clean interface like Google but below the search window it is showing the top trends that people are talking about in real time.

You can use search to find conversations, people and topics that you can use for ongoing searches. The trends are fascinating and take the concept of “Zeitgeist” all the way to its limits.

Leveraging this in your SEO activities

Both of these tools are capturing information from people from their social media activities. The way to leverage this in your SEO activities is to do the following things:

1. Create a Google Profile and put in all your social media profiles so it knows how to spider all your conversations
2. Use Twitter search to type in keywords you are interested in and see what people are talking about
3. Use your social media channels to add to this conversation.
4. Repeat.

I know that might all sound too simplistic but that is what it really comes down to – tell people who you are and where to find you and just engage. So what are you waiting for?

With all the focus on tuning content for search engine optimization we often forget in the most basic things when setting up a site that do some great things for your web site. One of those things is using a sitemap.

What is a Sitemap?

WebUpon describes it as “A Sitemap is a graphical representation of the architecture of a website. There are two kinds of site maps. The first is used to assist visitors to a site to navigate the site and the second is done in XML. XML Sitemaps, usually called Sitemap with a capital “S”, are used by Goggle to gather information about the site.”

Sitemap is especially important if your site:

Option #1 – Create it manually or use

Create a Web Page with the Text Link on the front page to “Site Map” and have that page detail out the site is the simplest way to do it but it doesn’t do things like exclude private pages or talk in the language search engine prefer. You can use Google’s Webmaster Tools to generate the sitemap in this format and create a file called “Sitemap.XML”.

The only caveat with this tool is that it is a static version of the sitemap so if your site is updated frequently with content (e.g. blog) you might want to look at option #2 and use a plug-in.

Option #2 – Use a plug-in on your Content Management System (CMS)

Many content management systems have this basic functionality built in or offer plug-ins to help you do this quickly. These usually are very flexible and their management screens allow you to specify which pages for Google or other search engines to index. To show you something like this works, here is a great video using the Wordpress CMS and Google Webmaster Tools:

Resources Mentioned in This Post:

Sitemap Generator Tools for Google and Many CMS Programs

Google Webmaster Guidelines

Google Sitemaps In-Depth

Why a Sitemap is Important

Here’s a followup to my entry about DC-area late-summer social media meetups; this week, I went to two of the events from the list.

The first was the First Official DC Google Meetup, at the swank Lima Restaurant and Lounge in DC. (So swank, in fact, that a would-be attendee posted to the Meetup event page that he was turned away at the door for wearing jeans. Lesson for us all: Know about the venue, while I am a fan of the “scruffy startup techie” look, remember that it’s always better to be over-dressed than under-.)

This meetup was billed as being open to Google employees, developers, and users (which, practically speaking, means “everybody.”), and featured a few Googlers from Mountain View. It’s apparently part of a Google goodwill tour happening across the country (and possibly the world), stopping in cities where they have a staff presence (and some where they don’t.)

Like all events of this sort, it’s a chance for employees to press the flesh, spread the word, get user feedback and do a little evangelism. As this was mostly a general audience (and not, say, an audience of developers), the presentation content was pretty basic: History of Google and Google products, some PageRank/search 101-type info, and Q&A session featuring pre-submitted Google Moderator-ed questions, as well as live questions from the audience:

And of course there was a trivia contest, where the prizes were Google Meetup T-Shirts. (Having been on both the giving and getting sides of swag distribution, I shouldn’t be amazed by the lengths people will go to get a a free, prominently branded t-shirt, yet I am.)

The next event was the next night, TechCocktail DC 6, once more at LeftBank in DC. As the name suggests, this was the sixth DC edition of this tech networking meetup started by Frank Gruber and Eric Olson, though it was the first that charged attendees. However, being well-branded and well-known to attendees, I don’t think the ten bucks dissuaded anyone, as it was about as crowded as previous editions (Me, I got comped, not because of a special “in,” but because they’d offered free admission to the first folks to retweet the event info — a bit of directed word-of-mouth.)

When it comes to TechCocktails and similar events (like the various Twin Techs), the draw for me isn’t the demos, but the people. (Partly because it can be challenging having a meaningful conversation in a bustling social environment).

Twin Tech is particularly challenging for me, because I usually know a lot of the folks there, and if I’m not careful, I’ll find myself spending most of my time talking to people I already know, instead of meeting new folks and finding out about new companies and products:

TechCocktail co-founder Frank Gruber and NetSol’s Shashi Bellamkonda.

This dynamic was in full effect on Thursday, because the AIM team was there, including many of my former cow-orkers [sic] and the revitalized AIM Running Man, so I probably did spend more than my fair share of time with them. (Though I did have an interesting talk with AIM Express lead Shawn Carnell about some not-very well promoted features, including an Adobe AIR-based multi-protocol client that provides group chat, including for SMS users — I will have to try it out.

Anyway, looking ahead, I can already see the events calendar filling up. Remember, folks — if you’re interested in the online space, meeting other thinkers and seeing what tech trends you should be aware of, see what’s going on in your neck of the woods and participate.