Day one at SES proved to be very enlightening. Rather than spending time reviewing the traditional SEO practices, which we at Rock Coast Media, Inc apply to most projects, I took the opportunity to attend sessions on social networking, which has been theorized to be the next big thing.

As of this writing, this is no official definition yet for social networking, but it basically means humans finding sites and telling others about those sites. Humans are making judgments about which sties are good and which are not, which is very different than a computer algorithm looking at code, content density, title tags, inbound links etc. Social networking likely is going to pick up where search engines can not; making subjective judgments based on esthetics, pose, and other such intangibles. What does this mean? Humans can judge an image, sound clip, video or other multi-media source, which the web is producing in mass quantifies now, much better, as often there is no metadata or contextual reference to determine if the web file is important, relevant or even popular.

Yahoo and MSN are on the cutting edge and may outpace Google with the use of human interaction in the near future. In one session at SES a Yahoo and MSN representative demonstrated how social networking can influence page #1 ranking for many queries, both tail and significant ones. Both of these search engines are using the trust factor of humans in their applications to better judge what a good site is and what is not.

On the other hand, Google, through its Google Co-op, has attempted to get into the social networking field, but its two main applications, Google topics and Google subscriptions, will only work to the web users benefit if the person searching on Google has already visited the web site once before and subscribed to an RSS feed. While this may prove to be a great source of new content for users, it will not help new users find the web site. Yahoo and Microsoft especially have created new applications allowing users to create their own vertical search engines, which will display in the rankings if a query is structured just right. This of course can then be optimized on the developers end by conducting proper keyword research.

It looks like we have come full circle. Just like when the Internet first came out and humans had to judge web sites, we are back to allowing actual people to rate and categorize web sites which others will follow.