It is amazing what can happen in one week in the online world!

In this one week, we have seen Google make a major shift that impacts every business with either positive or negative impact, depending upon how you use the Internet to reach your target audience.

Google Caffeine is a major change from how search engines used to work. Prior to June 8, 2010, a search engine crawled the internet from one site to another, indexing pages and storing the static page copies of a web site on its server.

Every few weeks, depending on how often a site is updated, or every few months, a Google crawler would come back through the site to see what changes had been made, if any.

Now, instead of refreshing its index every few weeks, Caffeine enables Google to analyze the web in small portions and update its search index on a continuous basis and on an enormous scale.

This puts blogs, social media, and content development on center stage!

The reason for Google’s introduction of a more caffeinated search is simple – content on the Web has evolved. The introduction and importance today of video, image, audio, real-time updates and reviews makes the Web a far more complex environment and one that Web users have grown accustom.

Already, Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel which, if it were a pile of paper, would grow three miles taller every second.

So what does this mean for you?

It means that static five page web sites will no longer do the job by themselves.

It means content management sites that give you the flexibility to update them and add pages will be more important and more critical to your online success.

It means blogging and social media (i.e. Facebook, Twitter,  YouTube, Linkedin) become extremely important to your overall online marketing strategies.

Why?

Because they add new content on a regular basis. Content that ought to be relevant to your audience and content they want to read. Secondly, because static web sites will now get pushed back on search results because they don’t contain new content.

Content is king, and, trust me, no matter your business, you have plenty of content you can share with your both your customers, clients, and prospects.

A few weeks ago you might have been able to afford not to do anything but have a web site. Today, that is no longer true. You must have a web site, and you must add new content.

I’ll go ahead and say it…You must have a blog and you must properly utilize social media, and all of it must link back to your web site. Google and the other search engines now crawl this rapidly changing content.

We live in a world that is rapidly changing, and people aren’t always finding you, you may be finding them. How well are doing at it?