Robert_Charlton - 11:22 pm on Oct 11, 2010 (gmt 0)

I always understood SEO as optimisation of websites for search engines. Am I alone?....alone........alone...

You're not in Kansas anymore. Google is now looking at more factors beyond literal keyword matching, PageRank, and anchor text. ;)

In this March 2010 BBC video... [news.bbc.co.uk...] ...Eric Schmidt, beginning at about 2:20 in, discusses the part he expects social to display in the Google algo.

...social cues... social maps... social information... to produce better decisions... so the social information we're getting now is just another input of better ranking. If your friend liked it, it's probably more relevant to you, so we should rank it higher.

I'm not suggesting you take SEO advice from Eric Schmidt, but I would keep an ear open.

It's clear that Google is monitoring social media and general buzz. That doesn't mean they're just simplistically counting Retweets, though. They're undoubtedly also looking at user behavior, and search behavior, and they're mining information on the web in all sorts of ways. The above from Eric Schmidt, btw, might be read to apply only to searchers who are logged and are social network participants themselves, but I think it's probably more complex than that.