SEO Is Changing With Hummingbird Speed

The way Google ranks keywords is changing. Recently, the search giant released Hummingbird, its new algorithm, which focuses less on specific keyword terms and more on the context of keyword phrases.

“Hummingbird is really focused on the meaning of words,” says Brian Bluff, president of Site Seeker Inc., in New York. “The fact that Google is making keywords disappear makes us believe that marketers will be able to cast a wider net.”

There is a new phrase in the marketing world: “Content is king, distribution is the queen and she wears the pants.” In this case, distribution refers to how created content is deployed on the Web.

The days of “keyword stuffing” are over. Businesses must now figure out how and where to deliver the most relevant information to consumers if they want to show up in page rankings. This includes applying a cache of online vehicles, including blogging, infographics, e-mail marketing, site linking and social media, the sum of which are commonly referred to as Inbound Marketing.

For example, if a distributor writes a blog about carpet care on his website he could potentially share it on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn; start a discussion in a carpet cleaning forum, include the blog in a newsletter or e-mail; or upload a carpet care tutorial video to YouTube. Each link is documented and, therefore, ranked by Google and its search counterparts. The more links Google finds, the higher a distributor is pushed to the top of the search results.

As the Hummingbird algorithm takes precedence, so does a company’s social ranking. Google analyzes how much traffic is coming from, or moving between social feeds and company websites. And the importance of “social search” — the search queries conducted within a social site, is also growing.