Written by Fernando Maciá
Simon Heseltine, SEO Director at AOL, Techcrunch, Huffington Post (Washington D.C.)
He starts talking about the death of SEO:“it’s a lie, SEO evolves, changes, adapts, but whoever says that SEO is dead is confusing SEO with spamming, with people who try to cheat search engines“.
SEO is to achieve and improve that users can find what they are looking for and that the contents on the Web are in a position to be indexed. According to SEMPO, SEO is growing, as is Social Media. In Social Media, agencies used to focus mainly onbrand awareness, but now it is also used for customer service and to attract quality traffic to websites. When SEO and Social Media play together, the results are much better. This is why more and more agencies are integrating both strategies.
Also because they are realizing the impact that Social Media is also having on search engine positioning. The Huffington Post is one of the most linked domains from Twitter, Facebook and other Social Media sites.
Although The Huffington Post has its own commenting functionality, they don’t mind people leaving the site to comment on Facebook or Twitter because that way they attract more people to The Huffington Post.
Many people use their mobile devices when they are watching TV, to comment while watching their programs. People love to share their opinions and the clearest example was the comments made by people during the State of the Nation debate in the USA.
There are different ways to measure the virality of a content: tweets per minute, retweets per minute, likes per minute, shares per minute, comments per minute, clicks per minute… in real time, which allows them to promote the most viral content. They have measured the virality generated by the contents in each of the sections.
Very interesting: how to blow to fan the flames of virality. They detect where the debate is sparked to fuel the controversy and boost its virality even more.
Google is starting to show results from relationship circle images. Bing is showing them from your Facebook friends and Google is showing them from Google+. In this way, the social experience is being integrated into the search experience.
The canonical tags are not having as much strength in Spain as in the USA. Here they are more of a recommendation.
Social Media is going to drive organic traffic through relevance signals picked up by search engines so they are two worlds that are going to be increasingly interrelated and we have to consider them holistically.
