day 1235: New Search Algorithm

"Search for the Lord and for his strength; continually seek him."

A little known fact to most of us, well very well known to those who manage and watch search engine optimization (SEO) is that Google just changed their search engine algorithm, again.  They don’t change it every day but this latest change follows a recent overhaul in 2010. Google calls their new updates interesting things like, “Caffeine Update” and “Hummingbird” (the latest version).  Along the way they released partial updates like “Panda” and “Penguin”.  If you are wondering, what does this mean to you, well, maybe nothing, but it’s a good chance that your search results are going to change.  What is new is further advancement of “Conversational Search”, which should give us all a more natural way of typing in our queries and getting back what we wanted. Danny Sullivan of SearchEngine Land describes an example this way:

“"What’s the closest place to buy the iPhone 5s to my home?” A traditional search engine might focus on finding matches for words — finding a page that says “buy” and “iPhone 5s,” for example. Hummingbird should better focus on the meaning behind the words. It may better understand the actual location of your home, if you’ve shared that with Google. It might understand that “place” means you want a brick-and-mortar store. It might get that “iPhone 5s” is a particular type of electronic device carried by certain stores. Knowing all these meanings may help Google go beyond just finding pages with matching words. In particular, Google said that Hummingbird is paying more attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the whole query — the whole sentence or conversation or meaning — is taken into account, rather than particular words. The goal is that pages matching the meaning do better, rather than pages matching just a few words.” So, we could be at the dawn of a new era of search, or maybe not.  But, if we have a website, we should be watching to see if our SEO is improving or not and then adapt as needed.  
 
I love that God gives us always available search access to Him and He always answers.  Of course, like some search results, we may not understand how that answer is what we were looking for, but what we can hold onto and always trust is that His answers will always come back to us and whatever they are they will always be the right answer for us at the time.  Our search engine?  Prayer!  What have we been holding back that needs a little searching done today?  He’s waiting on us with His divine algorithm!

Reference:  Psalm 105:4 (New Living Translation)
 

day 805: Sign Up. Follow. Share.

"Therefore, go and make disciples of all the nations..."

If we tried, it would be hard to find a successful consumer focused company that does not have a social media strategy. At the end of the day and all the talk about search engine marketing (SEM)and search engine optimization (SEO), both of which are important to understand and have an expertise about, nothing will work unless you have people who will sign up with you (in whatever form you choose them to do so), then follow you, and finally share with others what they have learned or like about your company. It comes down to those three simple concepts. And, of course, for that to even remotely work we must have a product or service that is worthy of consumers spending their time, energy and social capital to sign up, follow and share. We would all be wise to stop and consider what it is that we are asking others to sign up for, how easy we can make it for them to follow and what are we making exciting and compelling enough for them to want to share.

This past weekend at my church in San Francisco, http://www.cornerstone-sf.org, (you may need to copy this into your browser as Blogger link insert is not working correctly), our Pastor asked me to share a few minutes about how we could use social media to get the word out about a new service and location in the city. We had created a small insert card for the weekly service handout and it was detailed about how to Sign up, Follow, and Share. As I was preparing for the short talk I was going to do it was not lost on me that what we want to have happen in Social Media, is the same message that Jesus gave us about how we are to live and express our faith. He asked us to sign up with Him. He then asked us to follow Him, each and every day of our lives, and He asked us to share the good news of His message and gospel. Thousands of years since Jesus walked the earth, we are still being called to do the same things with technology that could never then been imagined. God is calling each of us to Sign Up, Follow and Share. How are we doing in that calling?

Reference: Matthew 28:19 (New Living Testament)