Traffic Battle Plan 2012

Its about the data. Google’s and Facebook’s business is not search and Social. It is datamining. While Google has been changing many have complained that Google is no longer relevant. That is the point of search relevancy isn’t it?

Google’s job is guessing at your and my behavior such that they can serve us relevant advertising.

Google grabs that data through all the data it gets from your cookied searches, visits to websites with adsense, analytics etc, your signed-in behavior, and your Google Plus behavior and your Android phone locations and behavior.

Facebook gets to know you through their graph of likes, follows, friends, clicks, etc and of course your profile you create when you sign up. In effect Facebook wants to be Google, Google wants to be Facebook.

The world just got smaller. Do a search in New York and chances are real good that Google will serve you local results having to do with services in New York. Google Places dominates the local searches with at least 4 results. Often times number 1 of yesterday, is now possibly 8.

Littered within that search will often be images and videos. We ran a post years ago that some day Google will be the new Yellow Pages. That day has come.

Disinformation. Google has succeeded largely from incredible public relations to compliment their just good enough search engine. With their online personalities, they have been able to spread vast and complicated concepts to misinform what is/was actually going on.

The more things change the more they stay the same. Google has always been about links, then the title tag and matching h tags. This concept has not changed. Its just that there is less of the same coveted prize called organic search results for you to grab.

Less competitive terms are easy as they have always been and the super competitive keywords will continue to be difficult to get.

Links have expanded in their definition. Links are 80% of the game. But now you have likes, Google pluses, and other social markers that Google desperately is trying to track. I call these social noise makers.

One reason Google has moved forward with Google Plus as an answer to Facebook, and recently adding SearchPlus Your World is that they were being blocked out of tracking social graphsof the biggies Twitter and Facebook.

Additionally local citations, or your business name, address, city, zip and phone weigh heavily for your Google Places (local) ranking. They serve the equivalence of links in local search.