Type SEO in Google and you’ll get around 26 million results in less than a second. Wow. Isn’t that amazing? Look at the volume. How much content has been created around this concept? But, is it really that important? Or, it’s just because of a hype created around this term?

Why SEO?

SEO is a process to improve the visibility of a website in search engines. It starts from the design and development phase and continues till entire life span of the website. You want your website to top the list in a contextual search at search engines. You want your web page to be more relevant, more attractive, and more friendly to search engine crawlers. You want your customers, potential customers and other stakeholders to find you easily through Google. And, you want more traffic to your website. To achieve all this, you go for SEO.

Who requires SEO?

Remarkable websites like Facebook and Twitter don’t require SEO. They have enough meat to grab million eyeballs. They concentrate more on providing engaging stuffs rather than focusing on adding more meta tags and keywords. Quality writers also don’t care  about SEO. Set Godin would focus more on his next blog post rather than finding a way to top the Google rank, the rank which itself is overhyped.

So, who requires SEO? Average websites having average stuffs require SEO to manipulate the rankings in different search engines. You want to build a remarkable product – focus on the problem you are trying to solve. If your solution is brilliant enough to be recommended – search engines will follow you.

How traffic comes to your website?

When your website is new, most of your traffic comes from direct links. You give this link to your friends, your acquaintances, send emails to your contacts and people visit your website directly. That’s direct traffic. Next stage comes when you have people subscribed to your website. You achieve this by creating quality content, posting interesting stuffs on a regular basis. Once you have significant numbers of subscribers, your search rankings will automatically start improving.

Should I stop SEO?

No. I never suggested that. Keeping few basic items intact is required. Meaningful keywords, tags, URLs, titles, etc add value to your website. It helps in better organization of content. It also improves your internal search. Doing all this is not a rocket science. You just need to have some common sense.

Social Search vs Traditional Search

Facebook drives more traffic to major websites than Google. If you follow the latest trend around web traffic you must have noticed this news. One of the major traffic analysis firms Compete made this statement early last year. They said Facebook drives 13% of web traffic to major websites like Yahoo, MSN, AOL while Google generates only 7%.

What does it mean? All your effort to get higher rank in Google is a waste when social media channels are going to drive more traffic to websites.

Is it happening with all the websites? No. Not Yet. But, going forward social media is going to be the major source of web traffic. In that case, social media optimization will have more value than SEO.

Crux

People will appreciate your effort on your product / solution and not your effort on SEO. 

Aggregation is not a new concept for marketing professionals, but, it’s usage in Social Media is certainly a new buzz for them. As we understand from my previous post [on Social Media Marketing], the need to address this emerging market is fiercely felt. Companies are aggressively placing their marketing budgets to this newly created sphere.

In IT, we have been using aggregation in various forms. Drudge Report and The Huffington Post started the news aggregation while lots of other RSS feed readers started aggregating syndicated web content. These services played a big role in taking the web content easily to million of users who didn’t have time to browse websites one-by-one. After the social networking boom the next round of aggregation started in the form of Social Networking Aggregation. Lots of products / services were launched to cater this need. The new era on Internet is the era of Social Media. It has become the numero uno reason for browsing internet, surpassing the previous popular reason, porn. Plenty of social media sites are running and by each passing day it’s getting crowded more n more. Tracking each of these services is tough, hence, we need another form of aggregation, Social Media Aggregation.

Websites like Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, Identi.ca, Digg, Reddit has their own distinct features. Different set of people use these websites for different reasons. As a marketer I get a tough time when I try to track online presence of my brand across all these websites. In this scenario I would love to have an aggregator which can monitor all these social media websites and give me a consolidated report. ContextMine is one of such tools which does this aggregation. This market is also diverse in nature. For example, there are specific search engines to search content / messages floating on real time web. Collecta is one of those search engines.

Aggregated data which is contextual and real time, gives a real feel of your social reputation. Marketing professionals are already planning to utilize this domain, and owing to this need, there are plenty of services ready to cater. It would be interesting to watch out this space going forward.

In my last post, I talked about the power of information and how relevant information is still not a reality in web world. Taking that discussion forward, the next question is, if search engines are not providing relevant information, who does?  The answer is nobody does it at this point of time. But, there are many players who are working on this model, including Google. In third quarter of 2009, Google launched its real time search engine. While launching this new search they stated.

Search is a natural starting point for discovering the world’s information, and we strive to bring you the freshest, most comprehensive and relevant search results over an ever expanding universe of content on the multitude of devices you use to access it.

Our real-time search enables you to discover breaking news the moment it’s happening, even if it’s not the popular news of the day, and even if you didn’t know about it beforehand.

The point is, real time information may not be very popular but it’s relevant. There are many other players who are eyeing this market. Recently I was looking at a service socialmention. They have an interesting way to show search results. Along with real time search from across universe [that’s what they say]; they also show strength, sentiment, passion and reach of the searched object.

There is another service called whostalking. They have a different approach of showing search results. They categorize it with source. They have options like “Twitter”, “FriendFeed”, “Plurk”, “Wordpress”, etc. You can search your results from any of these sources.

If you look at many other small search engines, you will find they all are doing something innovative. They all are trying to grab a share of this emerging market. They all know – The Search Business is still open.