What is Personal Search & How Does it Affect Your SEO

What the heck is personal search anyway?

Google introduced the concept of personal search a few years back but it’s not been until recently that it’s received a lot of buzz in the recruiting industry. Yahoo and MSN (Windows Live) have followed suit and also have personal search capabilities.

Once you're logged into a search engine account, like Google Gmail, your search engine results are modified based on your past history of searching, your bookmarks and what’s on your personal homepage. This is another reason why rankings are an old school metric for evaluating success.

Example: 3 People Search for “Beatles”

• Searcher 1 – receives results geared towards “the band”
  


• Searcher 2 – receives results geared towards “the bug”
  


• Searcher 3 – received results geared towards “the car”

Personal Search is the search engines way of trying to deliver the most relevant results to you. You can tell whether or not you are receiving personalized search results because it will tell you in the upper right hand corner. Personalized search results only effective first page listings.

How will this affect your SEO Strategy?

For those that already concentrate on relevancy, creating search-engine-friendly sites and user-centered content, this won’t have much of an impact at all. For those that are not, you’ll really need to re-evaluate your SEO strategy. Understanding your target audience and user engagement are critical to attracting the attention of those that use personal search.

Ways to Optimize Your Site for Personal Search

The key is to ensure your site is “sticky” you want users to find your website relevant and stick around for a while. The longer a user is on your site the better. In addition to quality content (I can’t stress that enough) be sure to have features that engage your target audience.

• Blog
• RSS Buttons
• Bookmark or Favorite Button
• Video
• Social Network Components

At the end of the day as long as you keep “users” at the forefront of your SEO strategy, you can’t fail.

Common Mistakes Made with Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing (SMM) is no longer the “new kid on the block”. This internet marketing channel has really become an integral part of many organizations online marketing campaigns.

Social media marketing can be described as a “word of mouth” form of marketing. What some often forget though is that the true goal of social media marketing is to provide useful and relevant information to people. If leverage correctly, buzz and search engine visibility will happen naturally.

The problem is that some don’t take this goal to heart and are making many mistakes along the way. On the web perception outweighs intent. How people perceive your social media marketing efforts will affect your organizations reputation, as well as the ability to connect with customers.

Top ThreeSocial Media Mistakes

1. Participating in to many tools – Signing up and building a profile on every new tool is not the best strategy to take. (I have been guilty of this myself) When you try and manage more then a handful of profiles you usually end up with what they call “naked profiles”. A naked profile contains little to no information. In order to get anything out of social media platforms you have to be willing to invest time into building up quality content rich profiles.
   
   
2. Self Promotion Overload – Social media users generally frown upon self-promotion.
   However from my experience I’ve found that the 80/20 rules works just fine. Promoting yourself and your services in moderation is ok as long as you are an active member of the community. When you use the service solely as a promotional platform and don’t provide anything of the value to the community that’s when they start to label you as a “spammer”
   
   
3. Setting up & Ignoring - Social media is similar to SEO in that it's a process. It’s a time investment and one that you need to take seriously in order to be successful. After you've set up your profile, go into the community, listen and participate.