Internet Search Grows Up
In the early days of the Internet search engines weren’t much more than electronic versions of the phone book. We called those sites and portals “index sites”. As computers became more powerful the next generation of search engines actively went out and read the text on your web pages and indexed it. There were lots of things that you could do to make your page stand out over the rest and “Search Engine Optimization” became the name of the game. As in life, while self-promotion is important what others say about you is often more important than what you say about yourself.
Technical terms such as “page rank” were born, and getting links to your site from other sites became extremely important.
While still important, Internet search continued to advance, and expanding on the idea of “what others say about you” search engines have grown to include interactions with social media as a primary driver of the ranking of content quality.
Having some “like” or “follow” your pages is something of an endorsement, and pages with endorsements will be ranked higher in search engines than pages without endorsements. As such, social media can no longer be ignored by small business. If you don’t use it, if you don’t integrate it with your web site, then your competitors who do are the ones who will get the traffic and survive.