Full Disclosure Confession: I don’t get the whole social networking phenomenon. Perhaps it is because I am a gentleman of a certain age. MySpace is mine and I have no real desire to share it with anyone beyond my other half… and my dog. I leave the Twittering to my parrot. I am not Facebooked as I have no overwhelming desire to make contact with my primary school cohorts. I am LinkedIn, but that’s about that.

And I actually don’t get it from a SEO/SEM perspective simply because there is far too much beyond my control which implicitly and necessarily implies I am a control freak. I am a control freak. And I like numbers that have relevance. Who. What. Where. When. Why.

The auditorium is packed with spectators there to cheer on their favorite contender!  In one corner, weighing in as the largest search provider the world has ever seen, with creative genius that seems to never falter, and a “the sky is the limit” develop and deploy stance that has seen them through to the development of robust search tools, you have Google - The search engine that would, could and did, also known as the search engine that will, can and does!

Image Courtesy of ahajokes.com

Social networking is increasingly becoming a vital aspect of our search marketing efforts. The connections we form amongst our online social communities can provide ever-expanding avenues of awareness of our sites, brand recognition, and ultimately buzz and link-love.

Sadly, however, there is a dark side to social networking. This dark side is one that we’d rather not talk about because we are afraid we might see it within ourselves. What could possibly be so scary? I call it the swirling vortex of social networking.

Have you ever happened upon a blog, and thought to yourself “Wow the information on this site is fantastic … how does the world not know about it?”.

It happens often. The problem is; content alone is highly unlikely to be sufficient to build any significant authority. If half the battle is creating great content, the other half is all about who ya know. In the end, build a better mousetrap, and the world will not necessarily beat a path to your door!

A very good friend of mine, and senior executive with Google, suggested to me today that the search giant is imminently poised to begin consolidating the search engine optimization industry. Google plans to make SEO services available to web site owners and marketers directly, to better enable them to increase their advertising return on investment and make their web sites more effective, for free.