All these social content changes that are happening at the moment: Google’s “Search, Plus Your World”, Twitter spitting its dummy out because… errr well there’s no real reason other than them kicking themselves for backing out of an opportunity last year with Google… however, I digress…

Having both battled the search engines for a substantial amount of time and also worked with the flow of algorithm changes, I can tell you that two things are for damn certain:

1. The power to rank is no longer with webmasters. It’s with the users of the web
2. Users expect social value because connectivity and interaction is just the way the web is evolving.

What is meant by Social Content Value (SCV)?

SCV means that the visitor experience and searcher’s priority is what will decide the future of your (optimisation) efforts. Your page’s value is going to be governed by the social content it gives to the user that solves a certain need. Not by what rests behind your website’s catalogue, or plainly how many on-page factors you got right.

Social media is getting more and more important in this context of visitor experience. This has been proven by Google’s updates – “Google Panda”, “Google+”, “Google Fresh” and yesterdays “Search, Plus Your World” update (10/1/12) – returning personal search results within organic listings.

How is social content going to leverage your SEO efforts and what you can do about it

1. Improve your social reputation on Twitter, Facebook

As of November 2011, it is clear that apart from media presence at these two sites, the comments, buzz and follow-up generated by an article, post or video is bound to affect the value of the page. Aside from this, the social reputation in terms of public view/response marked to the social web presence of a community, page or representation of a figure or organisation, will affect the social value associated with that figure or organisation in the eyes of the search engine.

Yes, the web search quality team at their offices actually gather and analyse these as signals of as a means of ranking. This is adopted as an improvement in the “real time search tracking” component of the latest update. This ideally focuses on the live tweets or updates sliding up on the pages and twitter profiles.

Do keep in mind that if the search engine bot cannot crawl your page, it doesn’t really count. So your pages must not be forbidden or they won’t get found and people over at Google can’t obtain the data they need.

Also, the importance of original, reader engaging content is very high here,because in normal linking schemes, people are trying to get reciprocal links and share link bait. But here, you can’t get reciprocal follows, which would moreover just spoil the quality of the page.

2. Freshness of social content has points

Google earlier rolled out an update to index and crawl pages a lot quicker by improving their data capture and filtering from each webpage and social media outlet.

Now, to go hand in hand with that and make sure over doses of repeated content don’t make the same stuff crawled quickly and easily over and over again, they’ve introduced the “Fresh” update in November 2011, taking carefully scrutinised pages to show to the searchers. This update is designed to give you the most up-to-date results for the keyword entered. Almost 40% of Google searches are going to get reset because of this, repeatedly in the coming months.

• The first target of this “freshness” filter is news-related topics and forums. The changes made just minutes back are getting indexed.

•  The next target is calendered events. If an event is being heavily marketed on social networking sites and blogs, or buzz is spreading like fire, it gains top rankings quickly and peaks on as the date of the event closes in. Now earlier, once the calendered spot was up in the search, it took a considerable amount of time to go down.

Now, the moment the buzz starts to die out, the rankings start to drop after the event.

So, your best bet is to serve your community further and give them more opportunities to share social content and get involved with you more often. Make sure they always have something excellent to look forward to from you. Each time, the more buzz will be spread for it and the relevant event/opportunity will get it’s deserved spot on or near the top.

•  The third target is sites that have large user interaction. The more fresh content is there on your site, the better fruit your SEO efforts bear.

But if your content is primarily user generated, then that’s even better as the users are already valuing your site and want to use the information you have to offer. the “fresh” update will acknowledge this.

3. Social Content from creating discussions is the goal

• Social media has always been about sharing
• Users and searchers have always been about sharing
• The web has evolved to become a platform for sharing.

So, the key word (‘scuse the pun) here is “sharing”. And when doing SEO, you must know that the search engine indexing you’re trying to consolidate in it’s servers is the same web which has a motive of sharing!

This is why just spreading your message out or getting your page re-tweeted isn’t enough. Though it does you good, what does you better is the sharing that’s need driven.

When people discuss problems and solutions, share general awareness on your blog or do something regarding your webpages at a forum, they’re actually developing social value for you that’s need driven. They’re sharing thoughts, views and answers as social content that carries more weight in the eyes of others who may have identical views or questions that require their answers.

And finally…guess what?

These “others” are the people who’re entering most of your keywords into the search box. So they’re getting to see your site at a good ranking without you even having to put in too much effort. Just open your online presence for the people to discuss. It’ll boost your rankings on autopilot.

That said, social content has and will continue to affect SEO efforts in the future, (with social search and social signals). So focus on your social media efforts, value generation and open the doors to the recommendation engine – it’s not going to go away any time soon, and the way things used to be are not going to come back…!