As you may have heard, Bing is starting to feature Facebook “Likes” in its search results.
This means that a search results page on Bing will start showing which of the pages your Facebook friends like, and how many of your friends like them.
What Bing is doing is just the beginning. It’s the first step in using social media to give popular site pages more prominence in search results listings.
This is huge, because until now, the position of pages featured on any given search results page has been determined by the relevance of the page, and the authority of the page, as determined by inbound links.
Google in particular relies heavily on inbound links to help it figure out how good a site page is, and where it deserves to be placed on its search results pages.
So here is the question...
Which is the more reliable indicator of page quality – inbound links, or social media “likes”?
Only time would tell. But my guess is that the use of social media, as a means to help determine which pages get listed on page one of the major search engines, is going to grow very quickly.
So what does this mean for you and your own site or sites?
It means you have to become seriously engaged with your readers through social media. It means having a Facebook page. It means having a Facebook Like button on your content pages.
But it also means creating plenty of new, fresh, social media friendly content. The days of occasionally adding a new evergreen content page are over.
You need to add more pages to your sites, more often...and you need to make them shareable.
OK...now we come to the part where all roads seem to arrive at me recommending Web Content Cafe.
Well, there is a reason for that. I created the site earlier this year because I could see how social media was becoming more and more important, across the web. And I knew that social media needs feeding, with fresh content, regularly.
That’s why the promise of Web Content Cafe has always been to provide you with a new content idea daily, five days a week.
Bing is just the first to integrate social media likes in its search results, but it won’t be the last.
You can no longer hope for high listings just with strong SEO and inbound links.
Now you need to appeal to social media sites too.
And that means adding fresh, shareable content to you sites daily.
If you want some help with that, sign up for Web Content Cafe membership...
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