Social media is the evolution of online search and marketing.  Its everything we have been doing but faster.  Twitter is instant blogging.  Facebook is the original AOL right?  Make friends online, chat and leave them messages.  The web is constantly evolving at a faster rate.

Current SEO practices have basically remained the same since I began in 1998, adding some changes over the years, and we will have to evolve into the social web. Over the past 15 years I have seen the changes leading up to this. In the early 90’s it was Infoseek that dominated the search space. Loading your webpage with your search terms got your 1st page ranking. As we came into the late 90’s the king was Yahoo and the “popular buzz” was the amount of backlinks to your site that ranked you higher.  I proved this by ranking 10-15 of the top 20 positions on Yahoo from 1998 to 2002 and on Google in 2002-03 for “home loans”. Then as Google became the dominate player PageRank became another major factor and aged sites like mine had PageRank.  This is the quality of inbound links.  As the online digital age moves into an even faster way to communicate using social networks, Google will use these communication signals to determine what the “buzz” is and make that relevant in search results.  This buzz started with meta tags keyword density, to amount of backlinks, to PR links, and is evolving to social media. I have continued to adopt new technologies early on which benefits me and my clients as we continue to rank 1st page for high traffic keywords.

But keep in mind its only one factor for ranking and not evenly weighted when its comes to using it for SEO. Social Media is still a great experiment. Lastly Twitter and Facebook have added search functions, Google added +1.  These next few years are going to be very interesting to see who will dominate the Web for search.

Lifestyle was on .com
Serenity was on .net
Woo was on .org

5 days later my rankings were

.com #64
.net #1
.org #4

I left them alone for two weeks and .com moved up to #43

So two weeks later I switched the StudioPress themes to the following:

Lifestyle to the .net
Serenity to the .com

3 days later the sites reversed positioning

.net (Lifestyle) dropped to #47
.com moved to #1

My last test I changed the .org (Woo) theme with the .net (lifestyle)

A week later the .org (now Lifestyle) moved to position #33
.net (now woo) moved up to position #6

Now I published these results on the StudioPress forum and got so much slack from the moderators,developers, and so called SEO experts there. They eventually took my post down.  I guess thats why they still use PPC. LOL. However I received a few emails from people who were so thankful for my post and changed out their Lifestyle Theme.  I heard back from a few of them later and their sites moved up several pages.

The funny thing was this post in the StudioPress forum got pretty ugly.  Name calling, and people telling me that there is no way themes effect rankings.  Well over the years I have proven that a sites design, layout, coding, all effect rankings.  the position of keywords, internal links, images, and percentage of words vs. keywords all have an effect on your search rankings.  Too bad these guys at StudioPress wouldn’t listen to me.  But hey I have always been a trailblazer in the SEO field.

This Reminds me of the time I attended an SEO conference back in 2001 and this so called expert stated in front of a group of 1000 people that there is not magic number for the amount of keywords on a webpage. Keep in mind Yahoo was the big search engine then. So this so called expert was the SEO person for GetSmart.com which was a mortgage company similar to my LoansAmerica site at the time.  So I called her out and asked her to search yahoo for keyword “mortgages” and then keyword “home loans”. I then stood up and showed the audience that GetSmart was listed no where on the 1st two pages, however I had 18 websites on the 1st two pages.

So back to StudiPress.  They have great themes and a few of them I do recommend for SEO:
Corporate
Enterprise
Executive
Freelance
Serenity

Stay away from Lifestyle.