In order to get the best ranking results from your social pages and posts, there are
a few things you need to know about how Google manages to index the billions of new
posts per day, and which ones they decide to add as search results.

The first thing you need to know is that the social pages that are indexed are no longer
stored on a hard disk like they were ten years ago. Instead, the results are stored in
RAM across thousands of machines which is incredibly fast but also very volatile.

This is necessary because there are so many new posts that storing them in a hard disk
memory and sorting them later for the index is not an option. They have to be stored
temporarily and organized practically immediately for near instant (within minutes)
inclusion in the SERPs.

This means two things, because RAM is so volatile, a small system glitch or power
outage on the machine that is storing your new post could mean that the data is deleted
and will never appear in the index, second that the SE needs to find a way to pick out
the few pages and posts from each social network that they are going to index and add
to the serps, and they need to do it fast.

Not all new sites are treated this way, this is a new index system that was developed
specifically for social networks and sites because they are updated so frequently and the
data becomes outdated so quickly. We have seen pages that have been posted to Digg
appear in the serps in as little as two minutes and typically within 5.

With that in mind, the second thing you need to know is…

Obviously, every new social page such as a Digg post or a Squidoo lens cannot become
a top ten listing, regardless of how well optimized it is, otherwise the search engine
results pages (serps) would change every second!

So Google looks at a couple of things to determine the ranking of a users page or post.
First they look at the at the amount of time a post stays on the main page of the social
site and then they look at the amount of views it gets, how many users link to it, and
the amount of time users spend viewing the page.

What does this mean? It means that you need to find ways to get your new pages and posts
to remain on the main page of the social site longer, you have to get eyeballs looking
at them and you need to make sure they are looking at them for a long time, long enough
to read them in their entirety.

In conclusion…

First and foremost, and although I did not mention this before, it should make perfect
sense: The title of your post, page, lens etc. is the most important part of the process!
The more interesting and thought provoking it is, the better the likelihood of it getting
clicked and read.

Try to get your pages, posts etc. listed in the featured section of the social site main
page, the longer the post remains there, the better the chances of it becoming a top ten
search engine result.

Another way to keep it on the main page longer is to get your readers to vote it up, this
feeds into the next thing to do, which is…

Get people reading your new post as soon as it is posted, twitter it, send an email to
your list, post it on facebook etc. The more people that read your new page the better the
chances again, of it staying on the main page and ranking in the serps.

And this should go without saying, but I’m gonna say it anyway, make the post interesting
and informative so that the people reading it will read it all. This not only helps get the
current post listed, but it assures that the next time you make a post and ask your readers
to take a look, they will, because they expect it to be good.

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