If you’ve been keeping up with current SEO trends, you surely know how blog posts, images, video, tweets, Facebook updates and the other social networks need to be a key part of your overall strategy. Well, providing regular updates of great, new content on a variety of platforms has suddenly become so much more important, literally overnight!
Google has just announced its revamped search indexing system called Caffeine, which delivers search results that are fresher than ever before.
In Google’s own words:
Content on the web is blossoming. It’s growing not just in size and numbers but with the advent of video, images, news and real-time updates, the average webpage is richer and more complex. In addition, people’s expectations for search are higher than they used to be. Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish.
If there was ever any doubt in your mind about how absolutely vital it is to use a variety of Social Media and constantly post new content all over the Web, we hope this quote from Google has killed it once and for all!
What’s Goggle’s Caffeine search indexing system?
Google’s old search indexing system used to divide web content into different layers, some of which would only be indexed and updated every couple of weeks. This was because Google would have to revisit the whole of the Web for each update – a very time-consuming process.
The way Google’s new Caffeine search indexing system works is that small portions of the Web are analyzed at a time and new content is immediately added to Google’s index. This means that your new content will show up almost instantaneously in online searches, and you will potentially see a quicker payoff than ever, every time you publish a new piece!
How to take advantage of Caffeine for your SEO
The ‘here and now’ is more important than ever, which makes it absolutely crucial that you publish content on a very regular basis. You need to get into the habit of constantly blogging, tweeting, and posting little snippets of useful information every day, even several times a day.
Remember: this doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to burn the midnight oil, or write long, elaborate blog posts every single day. What you must do is to develop a workable system of regularly posting to a variety of sites and social networks. Tweet about your day-to-day life and business, write frequent, short 50-100 word posts on your blog, share interesting content you find with your online friends, take photos and post them to Flickr, do the same with video and Youtube, and so on and so forth. That’s the drill.
Install applications for Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and the other social networks on your mobile phone and get into the habit of posting updates and keeping in touch whenever you have a moment to spare. These actions that take just a couple of minutes a pop will add up over time and build you a following. Just as importantly, they will keep you at the forefront of Google’s search index on an ongoing basis.
At the same time, you must make sure not to neglect your website, and keep it regularly updated with fresh content. If you allow your site to become stale, it will slowly start to fall out of favour with Google, as the search engine gives preference to other sites that it sees are more up to date.
We also strongly suspect that Google is also taking into account other metrics about your site, such as how quickly your pages load, how many people are talking about it on the social media, and also how long people stay on your web pages, which can be easily determined if you have Google Analytics on your website. Work to optimise those too!
Now that Google has put its money where its mouth is in developing Caffeine, and has taken a giant step forward towards providing its users with content that is more fresh and relevant than, you simply have no choice but to follow suit if you want to keep up with the SEO game.
Don’t panic! Those regular tiny drops in the form of regular posts will not only fill your SEO bucket, but even make it overflow. Just keep at it and you’ll see results!
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Glad to see you’re keeping up with (and keeping us informed of) the ever-changing world of Google. My brain aches trying to disseminate all this indexing and search engine stuff, so thanks for putting it in plain English.
Wooow, that’s interesting. It seems that Google doesn’t sleep and keeps improving their search engine. It’s important to know how Google works and thanks to Sortedsite’s article we can improve as well our online presence.
Thanks!!!
Thanks Guys for your comments. The rate of change is immense what we knew last summer is now old hat. I think all these changes regarding live search and the importance of social networking are all good!
Interesting stuff! Thanks John for the info on such a pressing topic.
I see the positive effect of having your content indexed instantly. However, I am thinking about the importance of relevant and useful content vs. low quality and frequent updates.
How will google handle this? It will be interesting to see.
It’s getting more real time definitely. Thanks for the pointers. I like the trend that putting out more valueable content more often gets better rewarded then tricking and fiddling around with SEO tactics.
Not only informative, but very relevant. Social media is now a must for any company who want to stay in tune with their clients & reach out to potential business. At Pearly Grey we are fortunate to have an active & forward thinking social media strategy, thanks to John & the Sorted Sites team who keep us abreast of such developments.
I’m with Joe – sometimes trying to keep up to date with SEO developments makes my head spin. But the way you’ve explained it makes sense out of it.
Now I’m off to write a blog on a new site to see if it gets a Caffeine hit.
I have to say wow to google, always reinventing itself, creating school and challenge us to innovate to win possitions in search engine optimitation.
By one side is a challenge for those who are dedicated to Social Media Marketing. I think we have to see Caffeine like something to keeps us motivated to improve day by day, I mean, to be there. But on the other hand, as Jean-Paul I think that we have to consider the possibility that many people may fall into the easy comment without interest or relevance to users.
Finally is in our hands choose one way or another one, getting results or not. I see, with Caffeine google gives us a tool to get virality so in us is the knowledge to take it.
Thanks John for recommend me the reading.