Page 2

Google started it. Social media, especially with tools like FriendFeed, magnified it - page one is the place to be. The top of page one is especially the place to be. Those few days when Conversation Agent was at number five on AdAge Power150 many checked out this blog from that list. From number 16? Not so much.

Go on Twitter and you probably check only the first screen. Same conversation with the updates on LinkedIn and Facebook. History is something we studied in school, we live very much in the here and now with social media. Something that did not start with social, it started with news media. Social has one thing that makes this different - relationships.

With relationships we go way back. So much so that in those tools where the ability to have conversation is built in, older thoughts, chats, links or images that you share may pop back up again to the top. They have a chance to be new once more or new to you. The conversation is alive in digital format. Any one participant can activate it by commenting, bookmarking, and sharing. This should give you some thoughts on having a team vs. a Lone Ranger approach online (and in life).

So if your Web strategy is to refresh content on a continuous basis, remember that the archives play an important role in the great scheme of things. This blog, for example, has 888 posts and when I search for my name, the list of posts that comes up with the URL represents older posts that had quite a bit of traffic coming into them.

Notice also what ranks high in search. Does this give you ideas on the importance of integrating certain tools in your marketing communications strategy? I don't usually visit my blog from my own search. Way back, when the search button in my blog was not pulling up the posts I wanted to find for reference I occasionally used Google search.

When I was more active with comment on other blogs instead of FriendFeed, there were posts from other, high ranking, blogs with my comments that came up with a search on my name - page one high. What happens beyond page one? What happens if there are no comments?

Comments depend on many things.

For you to get more than a few, timing is a factor. Context matters. If everyone is thinking and talking about something and you happen to come by at the right time and place on that topic, your post, article, Web page - properly circulated - gets attention. Chances are that properly circulated means filtered in by your friends and connections.

Back to the Web pages, because I know that today search engine optimization (SEO) is becoming such a buzzword, even as much as "social media me this", "social media me that". I'd like an SEO strategy with a side of SEM, please. Such narrow focus may get you the same results a successful Digg gets you - an injection of traffic that comes over for a one moment stand. When it's all over, nobody may even remember your name. 

What makes people come back is the same set of ideas that make no difference if you're on page one or page two - valuable content and connections. Those pages then get more traffic because more people find them useful and share them. They become page one for your site. With social tags, they may become evergreen for some topics on Delicious. Also StumbleUpon and Reddit have a long tail on traffic to your site vs. Digg.

With distributed conversations, participation, a culture of sharing and linking, do we know anymore what page one is? Is it ok to be on page 2?

[images of my Google name page one and page 2 or side A and B]

Comments

[Peter Korchnak]

Page 1 is important for cold searches and inquiries, so if your business model requires those, go for it.

It would seem that if you cultivate relationships, offer valuable content, and are thus linked and connected, where you appear on the search results page is irrelevant. Through your network, the right people will find you. What's more, your perceived value will be higher this way because of how people found you. People may find content through page 1, but to value the content people trust people in their network/community.

It's not only ok to be on page 2, it may not even matter where you appear in search results.

[Brian DR1665]

I totally agree with Peter. This article gets me thinking as well...

- Aren't the top three listings on page one household names for which you wouldn't need to search anyway? Who Googles "Facebook" because they don't know where it is?

- If search engines are getting used more to find information we otherwise don't feel is valuable enough to commit to memory, wouldn't that sort of make getting to page one through any means other than organic taboo?

- Could we see college students in the future being told to write their research papers in SEO format instead of MLA, APA, et al.?

I'm something of a non-conformist with one foot in and one foot out of the box most of the time. Stuff like this is exciting because there is a little reinforcement that my working on websites with oddball, non-SEO-friendly domains for which there are no intentions of monetization doesn't mean that I'm doing it wrong.

It's like there's this little voice inside my head defiantly shouting, "You go ahead and follow all the SEO/SEM rules just like every other cookie cutter website out there. You do that. I'm going to continue to build MY website the way I want and THAT'S what will make MY site different and refreshing."

(Hopefully more than a handful of people will keep coming back. LOL.)

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Peter - point well taken on the distinction between finding and valuing. I did a short stint consulting for a joint partnership with The Blackstone Group, an amazing organizations that very few, the right few, know about.

@Brian - another amazing contribution to taking the thought further. Point 3 about college students is chilling. But consider this: how many companies are managed by people who have pleasing them and not doing what's right by the customer as the criterion for success? Isn't that the same concept in a way? Value is what keeps people coming back, the ability to listen and solve a problem. When you book mark or subscribe to a site, you cease to care where it is in search.