Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Understanding the term FUFISM and its implications for search.

My conversation on Google plus  (with John Kelden) has prompted this post discussing the issues of understanding FUFISM (Functional User Friendly Integrated Social Media)
I have not blogged here for a while, as I have been busy trying to get to grips with how best to explain FUFISM. in a way that I feel you, the reader will understand. If I am having difficulty with this how much more difficult will this be for those who have little or no concept of the impact of the social media on search and SERP's (Search Engine Results Pages)

An understanding of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is essential, but this understanding must be reflective of the current  reality on the ground, and not the misguided use that is currently in use  within the online marketing industry.  The fact that this very misguided understanding of SEO has been allowed to dominate the online marketing community and the web design industry for so long  is a serious problem, as it is exceptionally difficult to change a perception once it has been so deeply ingrained into the thinking and actions of any community.

The idea of the term #FUFISM came about because of the great difficulty I have in explaining the new methods used by search engines to generate SEOVI (Search Engine Optimisation Value Indicators) which they apply to all online material of any nature in any publicly accessible online location,  so as to develop SERP's (Search Engine Results pages) and match an end users search query to a set of likely online resources which would be the best set of matches  and then  return this set of online resources as a SERP to the end user.

In the early days of search way back in 1998, both inbound and out bound links, along with key words in the HTML code of web pages,  were the primary source of SEOVI, and Google used  no more than 33 separate identifiable variables (SEOVI) in their Search Engine  algorithms.  Many things have changed since then, computer processors have got an awful lot faster, on board memory is now much larger, and general computer memory is a lot cheaper. The amount of online data has grown exponentially, and is now being mined continuously by  search engines, and the retrieved information is being stored online in ultra large data sets where it is manipulated to gather SEOVI that the search engines are using to generate their SERP's

Today Google uses in excess of 250 different SEOVI (Search Engine Optimization Value Indicators) in multi stage algorithms, that use the data that search engines have stored in their ultra large data sets in extreme mathematical calculations to determine personalized search results which are delivered to end users along side personalized advertising in SERP's (Search Engine Results Pages)  Scary stuff

And now we have the HUMMINGBIRD ISSUE  which is a real game changer. The humming bird algorithm is an awful lot more powerful than any of its predecessors and even understands the meaning of sentences, not just single words. The humming bird algorithm is part of semantic search and is a very powerful tool that uses many different aspects of what we publish to determine a host of issues around our online work.

Google now uses author issues and publisher issues to connect many different areas of the web together so that individual authors can acquire authority in specified narrow niche fields, and carry this authority across to related works where the SEOVI  (Search Engine Optimisation Value Indicators) related to any specific author will be factored into a search query and push his / her work higher into the SERP's purely because of the associated authority on a specified subject or topic.

An authors SEOVI are relevant to  his / her posts and related articles in many different ways, and the Humming bird algorithm has a lot to play in these issues. Exactly how this is done is Google's  trade mark secret sauce, but we as end users who rely on this sauce,  need to be able to manage and manipulate where,  and how this sauce gets spread around to make our work more visible to our intended target market.  This is commonly referred to as SEO or Search Engine Optimisation.

The New Humming bird algorithm uses social signals in new and interesting ways that we will get to grips with as it evolves further. We already know that all the old SEO tools are still applicable, and the new SEO tools are just additions to the existing tool boxes which SEOP (Search Engine Optimisation Practitioners) will need to use on the new machinery that Google has put in place to accommodate the humming bird algorithm.

Those Search Engine Optimisation practitioners who have been using so called BHT (Black Hat Tricks) in the past are in for a surprise, as the author value of each published online resource is now an important factor, and authors who use BHT's will be punished accordingly.  Those authors and publishers who refuse to use accreditation procedures to have their authorship and publisher details accredited will not get the added value of those who are accredited.

It must be noted that Google has taken time to inform us that those who do not use accredited authorship and / or Publisher details will not be punished. But those who do will be rewarded in many different ways which will enhance the SEOVI of their work substantially, especially in areas where they are deemed to be an authority on any particular subject or topic in general. This applies to both authors and publishers who have taken the time and effort to set up their bases with the HTML 5 tags of
  • rel = me
  • rel = author
  • rel = publisher
So how does FUFISM fit into all this stuff where authors, publishers and BHT (Black Hat Tricks) are all thrown into one basket?

First we need to understand that FUFISM is an acronym for Functional User Friendly Integrated Social Media, and that by integration we are referring to the integration of your social media into your online marketing. 

Social media practitioners need to be constantly reminded that the end users or information consumers have difficulty in finding their information, and that there are only three ways that an end user actually finds any online information.

1) luck by finding a link in a page he /she is viewing (serendipity)

2)  the end user is referred to the page by some form of advertising including but not limited to:

  • word of mouth
  • news paper or magazines
  • radio or television
  • billboards or flyers
  • online marketing such as Google Add words and many others
3) the use of a search engine of one kind or another

The first option (luck) is very undesirable from a marketing perspective. The second option can be very expensive and is beyond the reach of most people who run community based web sites or run small businesses

This leaves the third option which is deemed to be free as search engines do not charge a fee to include a web site or other online resource in their index. The true costs here are the costs involved in performing SEO for these online resources such as web sites, blogs and social media pages.

So where does social fit into this soup of issues?

Search Engines are increasingly using social signals and associated posts as a primary source for many of their SEOVI (Search Engine Optimisation Value Indicators) and the links to online content within the social media now carry a lot more value within the algorithms that search engines use to evaluate online information and determine it's aboutness and semantic meaning. The new Humming Bird algorithm by Google is based on this new interpretation of available SEOVI and the interpreted semantic meaning of both published information and search queries.

What is the meaning of the word social in social media?

Social media is the term used to describe a host of online platforms where individuals make use of the platform to communicate with each other in friendly social environment, both for work and leisurely purposes, and the term social here refers to the people aspect of things.

The many different social signals associated with these platforms are used by search engines to determine a value of each post for the user base of the specific platform, and are directly associated with each individual user through each users personal profile, or the profile of a business page set up by an individual user, and this is in turn linked back to the authorship issues of each individual user, and in the case of a business page to the publisher value of the page in question.

why the terminology "USER FRIENDLY"

Well this is a simple one, as the user friendliness of the connected systems and user based platforms is evaluated in the complete context of user interactions and the ease with which a user can add or access relevant information within the specific platform.

The term FUNCTIONAL needs no explanation as I am sure every body reading here understands the words functional and functionality. Search engines use these factors in strange ways to give the information a score in the form of an SEOVI which is carried forward into the other sections of the search algorithm along with user friendliness, semantic meaning, social interpretation, social signals and other issues.

The target market of your online marketing is a primary issue as this will determine the keywords, language style, information layout and other related issues of your web page as well as the social media post discussing the information on the web page and its content and the context in which it is made available within the social media.

Now dropping these all into one basket we get Functional User Friendly Integrated social media, in a manner that search engines can best interpret your online information and related social media posts which gives the search engine the best opportunity to interpret the semantic meaning of your online information.

FUFISM includes quite a bit more though, as it is also a philosophy which ensures that your social media marketing is truly connected and integrated with your web site marketing, your blog marketing and your traditional marketing in a manner that ensures their interconnectedness is understood by search engines.

If a search engine can understand the interconnectedness of your different online marketing platforms and successfully connect your social media strategies to this then you will have succeeded in applying FUFISM and have really wonderful SERP's (Search Engine Results Pages)

These are not easy tasks and there are a host of different aspects that need to be considered, each of which will carry some SEOVI, and be interpreted by search engines in their own fashion. We as the creators (publishers and authors) of this information, need to take the necessary steps to ensure that search engines understand our intent and purpose when we make any information available for the search engine to evaluate, in a manner that the search engine can best interpret the semantics of our information so that they can match this to the semantics of any end users search query.

Social media allows us to add great value to the semantics of our web pages and blogs, provided we understand the semantics in the first place. This understanding starts with product/ service research and is followed up with target market research and matching our intended target market and the product / service together then using great copy writing skills to craft content  that fulfills these needs, and follow through with social media posts that connect the dots and supply the correct semantics to the search engine to match to our potential end users search query to our online content.

Many thanx for reading this document.  Please leave a comment here or visit our Google plus page and comment there.

2 comments:

  1. Frank, holy smoke.. I had no idea what or ever even heard of the acronym FUFISM. This is very instructional and easy to understand. Nor have I heard about the Humming bird issue. Simply fantastic...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Robert, the term FUFISM was introduced by myself, as it helps me to explain the concepts around SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) many of which need careful consideration by the top management / company owners, as this involves many others working together and requires a mind shift from the old way of looking at search engine optimisation issues.

    You may also notice that I talk of #SEOVI or Search Engine Optimisation Value Indicators. SEOVI is just another way of saying a variable which Google would include in their search algorithms.

    When using the term SEOVI an end user is more likely to grasp the importance of the issues than when you use other recognized terms.

    With the advent of Google humming Bird and the fact that Google is now openly using semantics and informing us of the use of semantics the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) Industry needs to behave in a different way and get the public to understand these new techniques of getting stuff higher up in the SERP's (Search Engine Results Pages)

    these changes will take time, but they are busy happening *NOW*

    ReplyDelete

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