Google Caffeine
Back in January as I watched Senator Scott Brown pull off an upset in the Massachusetts special election that gripped the country (or at least my neck of the woods), I came upon something that I had not seen before. Sitting at my desk, I did a Google search for Scott Brown to find out a little more about him. What a found in the #3 position was a dynamic twitter feed, giving me up-to-date news, information and city election results as well as opinions and tweets from around the country. I stayed glued to that Google page for a few hours learning what I wanted to know and then some, in real time, right there at position #3. Ah, this must be Google Caffeine.
Spring forward to June 8. Google has made the official announcement that Caffeine and their ‘new search index’ is complete. Being interested in a wide range of search engine marketing and optimization techniques, most of which include Google, I took notice and started to research what this might mean to someone like me. I found that it’s not as scary as I thought.
The basics are still holding true; titles and descriptions need to match the theme of the page, be well written and formatted properly. Content needs to be themed, original, and organized. Images need to be optimized to ensure your website is quick to load. Inbound and outbound links should be from/to relevant websites with keyword rich anchor text.
So what’s the big to-do about ‘Google Caffeine’?
It seems Google has taken the social web by the horns.
As the social web grows, evolves and permanently plants itself into modern culture, Google was bound to roll with it and turn out something that would leverage all the different social platforms, giving their users a wide range of the most relevant results possible.
Now appearing alongside and in place of many front page positions are real-time Twitter feeds, Facebook updates, videos from around the web, images, news, shopping feeds and more. Blogs are no longer restricted to the Google news section.
It makes sense. Google wants to show the most relevant, up-to-date, and widest range of results to their users. This is the core of what ‘Caffeine’ is all about, and it seems as of June 8th, they’ve worked out the kinks and officially released it. The social web is here to stay and social marketing your website should be top priority if you want to stay relevant in the changing search landscape. Twitter, Facebook, blogging, bookmarking, and user engagement are not passing fads, and with Caffeine, they now are being integrated into every household …. right next to the verb “Google”.
“As Google goes, so goes the Nation” to quote something I saw last week.