Now if you think this is just some random thing, this inserts values to the rel attribute of an anchor tag of the link you are linking to. Choosing any of these can trigger it one or any combination of these rel attribute values.

• friendship (pick at most one)
  • contact
    Someone you know how to get in touch with. Often symmetric.
  • acquaintance
    Someone who you have exchanged greetings and not much (if any) more — maybe a short conversation or two. Often symmetric.
  • friend
    Someone you are a friend to. A compatriot, buddy, home(boy|girl) that you know. Often symmetric.
• physical
  • met
    Someone who you have actually met in person. Symmetric.
• professional
  • co-worker
    Someone a person works with, or works at the same organization as. Symmetric. Usually transitive.
  • colleague
    Someone in the same field of study/activity. Symmetric. Often transitive.
• geographical (pick at most one)
  • co-resident
    Someone you share a street address with. Symmetric and transitive.
  • neighbor
    Someone who lives nearby, perhaps only at an adjacent street address or doorway. Symmetric. Often transitive.
• family (pick at most one)
  • child
    A person’s genetic offspring, or someone that a person has adopted and takes care of. Inverse is parent.
  • parent
    Inverse of child.
  • sibling
    Someone a person shares a parent with. Symmetric. Usually transitive.
  • spouse
    Someone you are married to. Symmetric. Not transitive.
  • kin
    A relative, someone you consider part of your extended family. Symmetric and typically transitive.
• romantic
  • muse
    Someone who brings you inspiration. No inverse.
  • crush
    Someone you have a crush on. No inverse.
  • date
    Someone you are dating. Symmetric. Not transitive.
  • sweetheart
    Someone with whom you are intimate and at least somewhat committed, typically exclusively. Symmetric. Not transitive.
• identity
  • me
    A link to yourself at a different URL. Exclusive of all other XFN values. Required symmetric. There is an implicit “me” relation from a subdirectory to all of its contents.

List from: http://gmpg.org/xfn/11

Do you think this has any use? Do we have to inspect the source code tags just to know the relationship of one site to another? Maybe these tags are ahead of their time that’s why?

So far the only application I have seen that uses this is Google’s Social Graph API. Actually I haven’t even seen a working application of this API but just the knowledge of the API exist. View the video below and learn more on this API. Now in SEO contest like SEOContest2008 and Yicrosoft Directory, if you link to your competitors, what XFN is that? Opponent? Enemy? *LOL*

Two benefits I see in Social Media doing SMO (Social Media Optimization)

1. Spreading of Viral Content
2. The Backlink

I consider the first one more valuable and if you are concentrating only on the second benefit, the link, I think you are not seeing the real power of social media.

Social media there are two general kinds.

1. Social Networking like MySpace, FaceBook, Friendster etc.
2. Social Bookmarking like Digg, Delicious, Reddit, etc.

In my experience, social networking works in certain niches. Those that are inline with the social network, the type of people on the network.

Social Bookmarking often tackle a wide array of topics and you could probably find a category fit for your SEO purposes.

Here is my tip: Really have good content.

Ok, we have heard content is king many times, and some people say, it’s not content links are king. But what some SEO people can’t see for some reason is good content is king since it makes links for you naturally. It’s quite simple but I have seen tons of SEO people in forums concentrating on the numbers, adding friends, and getting more friends to Digg their stuff. True this works too, but it would work even more if you simply concentrate on good viral content and don’t just look at Social Media as a quick link builder for any kind of page you make.

The reason you want to use the social bookmarking is for others to bookmark it too and promote it as well. But if your content sucks, why should someone bookmark it? If your content is useless or too much self-promoting or worse, useless and self-promoting, and you just use your account, your multiple accounts, your close friends accounts just bookmarking your post, this could probably even raise a red flag on the administrators of the social bookmarking site and might consider you and probably your friends as possible social bookmarking spammers.

If you are doing this solely for the link alone, you just get links from people that will bookmark you and if your content is not that compelling and is self-promotional too much your links will be limited only to probably the amount of your friends you have. You are just using Social Media for links from the Social Bookmarking site and it makes it no different from a link farm.

If you concentrate on content and then apply social bookmarking, and make your content is really compelling, interesting, viral, something that someone will really like reading and passing on to their friends, social bookmarking will work like magic. People will bookmark it, and as other people see the site as well, they will bookmark it, pass it around and even post something about it on their own blogs and sites.

I cannot stress this any more but I can give several sites that talk about writing good copy like Copyblogger. Problogger is also a good source but it just does not tackle copy but everything abot blogging and making money out of it. But by reading how the post are done, you can observe and learn already. I guess mostly every SEO professional knows Jason Calacanis said SEO is BS sometime back last year. I still don’t believe his statement 100%, but to some extent, he is correct in some way. He knows what he saying but of course I don’t believe SEO is BS. There are just so many SEO people that are concentrating on the link.

History

First, a little historical background.

A few years back (almost several millenia relative to the age of the internet), Yahoo was topdog in the realm of directory listing. You had the colorful pages, great categorization and easy-to-use search algorithm. They were king of the internet hill and anyone who is anyone was on Yahoo - and no one could even think of toppling them from the top.

Not long after, Google came out and they were no ordinary list. They were a search engine! Google had web spiders that crawled the net to catalog and categorize. No longer did anyone need to submit their pages for inclusion - they just had to make sure their site was crawlable. Yahoo was knocked off from their pedestal and Google became top dog.

The Present

Today, Google has maintained its position as head librarian of the entire internet. But it is getting old. Don’t get me wrong - they still have a lot of tricks that they are capable of but the web is yearning for a paradigm shift.

Today, with Universal search, Google has taken its stand as the master list of all that is in and of the internet. Being the master list, it is the most complete generic search engine there is - one that has searcheable info on everything that you will ever look for. That is Google’s strength. Sadly, it is also their greatest weakness.

Enter the vertical search engines. These are small search engines who specialize in a smaller subcategory of information. Their main advantage is that they are experts and masters of their niches not only thematically but also semantically. Meaning, they know their topics well enough to give you search options that Google can’t hope to give. Of course, Google still wins hands down in terms of range and coverage, but do you picture searching for your doctor’s contact info on it? Some would probably answer yes - but for those unlucky ones whose doctor is named John Smith or something more common (or even worse, has a more famous namesake), Google can be rather unforgiving.

Try looking for “Dr. John Smith” and you’ll see that the first medical doctor to appear in the lists come in the second page (barring the chiropractor). You narrow it down by adding “medical doctor” and Google first gives you a wikipedia entry on Dr. Who - the .

Now try looking for Dr. John Smith in a vertical search engine and they might give you options to narrow down the Dr. Smiths by field of specialization, are of practice, etc. See what I mean?

How to Beat Google

Let’s face it - you can never hope to beat Google at its game. It will remain to be top generic search engine. Yahoo is still top directory list, see?

So your only hope of beating Google is giving users something that the universal search cannot give if it wishes to keep its universal status: niche specialization. That way, you get a bigger slice of the users for that niche.

Who are the vertical search engines?

Here is a list of some of the vertical search engines available on the internet today:

VerticalSearch.com - a vertical search engine where you can search for vertical search engines
TopTenWholesale.com - vertical search engine for finding wholesale merchandise to sell
SearchFinance.com - search for financial executives and corporate finance
ThomasNet.com - search for industrial and manufacturing goods and services; it has search by product/service, company name, brand name, industrial websites or CAD model filters;
FindLaw.com, Lawyershop.com and Lawyers.com - search for lawyers by location and specialty
USA.gov - search for all things about the U.S. government, their services and what business necessities you can do online
IT.com - search for tech oriented industry solutions and providers
Yahoo! Local - search for restaurants-and-nightclubs, city guide, health and beauty, automotive, and real estate areas in your locale
Zibb.com - search for business that offers websites and blogs
Docshop.com, Web MD and AMA Doctor Finder - search for doctors and dentists
MTWord.com - search for medical terms, wordlists and drug lists used by medical transcriptionists
RX List - search for medicinal info, dosage and usage
Technorati - search for blogs
Pluggd - search for podcasts; filters for words inside the podcasts themselves using a semantic matching algorithm (meaning it will return podcasts with related terns as well as the word you searched for)
Retrevo - search for consumer electronics
Amazon and Barnes and Noble - search for books