8 years ago when I first got into web design and marketing I quickly moved into a specific area called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Early on the way to optimize a website for search engines was to load up with keywords. This was the “content is king” era. You could adjust meta tags, heading tags, bold keywords, and various things like that to target specific words you wanted to show up.

Google being the smart people they were realized what we all were doing at that time, and started giving less weight to content and more to how many other sites linked to your site(inbound links). They dropped all weight of meta tags, and placed so little on bolding and heading tags that it became not worth the effort. This began the “links are king” era of search engine marketing.

Being good and smart marketers like we were, we found ways around that too. We bought up tons of domains and had them all inter-link, we bought paid text links on top websites (and paid handsomely for them), and we formed coalitions with fellow marketers promoting each other’s sites.  Google figured this out and omitted paid links from search weight, links from the same IP, and links from pages with massive amounts of outbound links.

What Google (and now Bing) has always really wanted to get at is making search a social experience. Inbound links originally showed Google that people like this page and are talking about it. This never worked out quite like they wanted it to however. So now that the “links are king” era is over what is next?

Social is King. Google and Microsoft invested a bunch of money into buying raw data from twitter, facebook and other social networks. The plan here is to weigh links that people are talking about based on the person posting the link’s popularity, respectability, and other factors on the social network. Twitter is playing right along with the new Re-Tweet function which will for the first time collect how many times a post is retweeted and add additional weight to that particular post.

Google has a habit of weighing new things to the extreme when they first introduce a new weight to the algorithm. Combine that with the fact that they spent a ton to incorporate this into their algorithm and you can pretty much forget traditional SEO.

So what does this mean for companies? If you are not extremely active on social media and a respected member your website will soon fall behind. Social media is here and here to stay. In order to make it in the online world from this point forward you have to continue to develop and refine your social media presence. If you are paying someone to do your SEO it might be time to dump them and hire a good social media manager.