SEO optimization used to be the cornerstone for improving website rankings and increasing one’s popularity within search engines. Unfortunately, it was always considered lacking in terms of its efficiency and veracity. It was abused, due to the fact that it was entirely automated. Thankfully, the industry has evolved into an era where SEO optimization is to a great extent qualitative, rather than quantitative. Namely, a website can rise in popularity over its competitors if it truly is more useful to its users. This would mean that the users’ opinions would have to be taken into account, which is difficult, and has for a long time been considered impossible, given that the internet hosts over a billion users. The next step in internet evolution however, social networking sites, are now facilitating the possibility of user experience dictating website rankings.

The system is foolproof, in that search engines now carefully sift through various rankings that are exclusive to social media protocols. For instance, if a particular service is popular on a social network, this gives it better credibility if it were simply linked to somewhere online. Furthermore, there is a hierarchy within the actual social networking sites. Not all of them function the same as far as SEO goes. Being famous on Google Plus might work better than being tweeted about since tweets only stay active around 14 minutes, whereas posts on Google Plus remain almost indefinitely, gaining your page ranking.

The main reason why the latest generation of social networking sites are perfect for SEO rankings is that they are simply optimized and systematized in such a way that the users of these sites are now used to measuring their daily activities quantitatively, in the sense that, the average teenager might feel compelled to document every single store or service that they use through their social network. We have reached a stage of internet evolution where people are proud to document themselves regularly because it has become a way for them to affirm their life achievements. This bodes really well for corporations that intend to receive a good SEO ranking because quite frankly, if a company’s product is truly desirable, it is almost impossible to gauge the incredible size of the impact that social networks would have on their popularity. Word of mouth has evolved to a stage where it is now the cornerstone of SEO rankings. Social networking sites are where the future of SEO lies.