By Matthew Barker 

Google has recently announced a major new change in the way it organises its search results, bringing us one step closer to the future of “social search”, where search results are heavily influenced by the behaviour and interactions of your friends and networks on social media tools and platforms.

The social signals in question are shares and +1′s made on Google+, the search giant’s own social media tool and potential Facebook rival. In a nutshell, webpages or content that have been “plus-one’d” by your own friends and connections are now being highlighted within the normal search results pages.

It is all part of Google’s long-running mission of showing each user the most relevant and useful results possible. The thinking goes that if your friends and family like something, the chances are you will like it too. Or, in Google’s own words:

We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships.

This is one of many steps in the long walk towards truly social search. As search engine technology becomes ever more advanced, they will be using signals like these to determine the popularity and usefulness of each website. After all, if hundreds or thousands of individuals recommend a certain page using Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc, the page must be doing something right, and therefore deserves to be more prominent in search results pages.

Social signals like these will become one of the most important ranking signals of the very near future, and to achieve success in this new landscape means taking a very different view of our websites and the kind of content we put on them.

Think of a social interaction (be it a “Like, “Tweet, “+1″ or any other form of interaction) as a real-world recommendation. Users are reading your content and are recommending it to their friends. To elicit this kind of reaction, your content must be truly top-notch. It’s not often people go out of their way to recommend newspaper or magazine articles to their friends – it has to be extraordinarily interesting first. The same now applies to website content. Your site must be filled with extraordinarily interesting/useful/amusing content in order to elicit the social signals that will lead to search engine success.

So, what does this mean for web marketers and travel businesses? Get ready for the change. The future of search is very different to what we are used to, and only those who invest now in great and creative content will reap all the rewards of the coming era of social search.

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