When entire world is going gaga over Facebook and Twitter, I see a new champion emerging at the dais. This champion is focused at its work. It’s not wasting time to do experiments but quickly grabbing the top influential folks of the industry.  Werner Vogels [from Amazon], Evan Williams [from Twitter], Dennis Crowley [from FourSquare] and Steve Case [former AOL chairman] are just few of them. The name of this new champion is Quora.

What is Quora?

Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. The most important thing is to have each question page become the best possible resource for someone who wants to know about the question. This is the official answer from Adam D’Angelo, the founder of Quora. He wrote this while answering this question “What is Quora?”. At this page, you will find several other answers from Quora evangelists and Quora reviewerers.

There are some initial myths about Quora. Let’s take them one by one.

Myth 1: Many people will not like to join “another network”

My Views: I don’t agree with this notion. People love to try new things. They get bored with using same service. Change is constant and that’s why we said good bye to Orkut, MySpace and adopted Facebook, Twitter. If a new service is giving you a different dimension, a new way to satisfy your eagerness – you would love to try that.

Myth 2: Quora is for focused groups

My Views: In the beginning everything looks like a service for few people only. If you remember, Facebook was only for fun when it was started. Look at the scenario now. Every business wants its presense on Facebook. Same happened with Twitter. People were not sure as why they should use it. They thought it’s only for celebrities but that’s not the case now. I see the same with Quora. It may have some focused attention right now but going forward it will definitely have a broad appeal.

My experience with Quora

While preparing my blog SEO is overhyped I thought to get the opinion of others, especially those who are working in this industry. I asked a question on Quora and Interestingly the very first answer was from Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-Founder, SEOmoz. Other answers were also from reputed professionals. Isn’t it interesting?

Challenges for Quora

Every organization, be it a big one or small one, has some challenges. Quora has just started its journey and it also has some challenges. As I perceive, the toughest challenge in front of Quora is Quality and Sustainability.

Quality

Currently when you ask a question on Quora, you get quality answers from experts of the industry. It is possible as number of users and number of questions, both are less. When both will grow, the challenge would be to maintain the same quality. Quora will have to continuously attract experts from every spectrum of life.

Sustainability

The domain of Question-Answers is less traveled and less explored. The chances of getting initial success was high. Quora gained the initial momentum. Now, when the niche is known and some bigger players are also venturing in, the challegne for Quora would be sustainability. It would be nice to see as how they manage to beat the rest.

You can ask a question to me on Quora at http://www.quora.com/Nitesh-Ambuj

Quora still has invitation based sign up process. Let me know if you need one.

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. 

Around 26% of World’s population uses Internet and this phenomenon has grown 380% over last ten years. Billions of data are floating all over web but this technology is still into its beginning.  We all are moving in a high-tech society and those who have information will emerge as a winner. The concept is, Information is power – grab it as quickly as you can.

Information is power, true, but everybody doesn’t need everything available on internet. Digging into relevance, contextual information is the next step one needs to perform. Google, Yahoo, etc gives all the information you want for a specific topic but 90% of these results are not very useful. Also, they lack to provide categorical search.

For example, if I search for India in Google, it shows 42 billion results.

Do I need all of them? No – they all are not useful.

Then, how to get useful information out of it?

Can I have categorical information – something like, Sport, Politics, Business, etc?

When I search the same in WolframAlpha I get the knowledge related to India. Again, there’s nothing more than few statistical information. I tried this on search.twitter.com and all which I got was real time talks about India.  The point which I want to highlight is – they all are good in their own domain but users still don’t have lots of flexibility when it comes to internet search.

Going back to information – Internet is a major source. It has all the data we want but we do not have any tool to get relevant data out of it. Search Engines, Yes, they claim to crawl almost everything on Internet but that includes lots of junk data as well. They bring everything which they can. They can’t understand the context of search. Proactive search is something they simply don’t care to provide.

Recently we saw how Facebook surpasses Google as the most visited website on Internet. What does this mean? People are relying more on recommended information than searched information.

Does that give a signal of how Internet search is going to emerge in future?

Yes, it does. We need more social search than static search. We need to involve context with our search results. It could be in the form of region, interest, source, gender or any other broad category. We also need to provide this flexibility to users so that they can get data as they want. They should be able to configure their own search results.

Google is a giant in this business but going forward the power would shift to those who can provide relevant search, contextual search.

“Yes, we could make history, I guess”, the statement from Sergey Brin was not just a mere prediction. It changed the history of internet like never before.  Many players like, Yahoo, AltaVista, Lycos were doing business, but it was Google who created history. It changed the way people were looking at search engines. It changed the way people were doing business through search engines.

In early years of this decade most of the web players were suspicious about a revenue model around search engine. The scene was looking very gloomy to them and then came the innovative search concept from Google, Page Rank. It gave Google an edge over others and Google never looked back thereafter.

As we say, “History repeats itself”, the scene around search engine market is changing again. This time there are some other new concepts which are gaining attention. No, I’m not talking about Microsoft’s Bing. I’m talking about Twitter, WolframAlpha and Scoopler.

A new trend called real-time search is getting popular on web. FriendFeed, Facebook and others have already started using it but two key players which are doing some real serious business in this area are Twitter and Scoopler. The idea behind Scoopler is to search entire web in real time. This would be a key concept for all future search requirements. We need to keep an eye on this. Check out one example of real time search here.

Stephen Wolfram says, “Wolfram Alpha is a computational knowledge engine with one simple input field that gives access to a huge system, with trillions of pieces of curated data and millions of lines of algorithms.” Few experts claim that it should not be treated as a Google killer though going in details of this discussion gives a different view. Check out an article on this here.

Google still dominates the search engine market though the monopoly is not going to last for a long time now. Let’s hope to see some more innovative concepts.

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With the growing popularity of Internet we can see the spread of websites across boundaries. Search Engines are chocked up with the never ending flow of upcoming websites. People are using different methodologies to make sure that they put up their information ahead of others. Tremendous growth and huge amount of data is becoming a challenge for new age Search Engines. They are trying some smart ways to show relevant websites on TOP of search results. One of their smart ways to decide the ranking of websites is Link Popularity Management. This is one of the major deciding factors in the ranking algorithms of many popular search engines.

To achieve high ranking in Link Popularity Management, websites need to execute a robust Link Building Campaign. There are many things which empower link building campaign. Some of them could be, open source releases, guest blogging, text link ads, publication on social networking sites, etc. Relevance of links is another factor for consideration.

Before going for strategic planning for link building, let’s understand some basics of link. There are two parts of a link.

- URL (Uniform Resource Locator) – Web address of the page.
- Anchor Text – Visible Text which points to the web address.

For example Google Mail (Anchor Text) can point to an address like http://mail.google.com (URL).

Here, “Google Mail” is the anchor text and it is one of the key elements of link building and getting a high page rank.

After formulation of link, let’s understand how many types of link can occur on Internet. There are two broad categories of links, inbound and outbound. Inbound links are links which are posted on some other website and gives a pointer to your website while the outbound links are the links which are posted on your website and gives a pointer to another website. Webmasters generally have an understanding to put links on their websites. Like, webmaster of “website A” will put link for “website B” while webmaster of “website B” will put link for “website A”. It means they are exchanging links for getting higher page rank. This agreement is called reciprocal. New age search engines are smart enough to understand this and they don’t give much relevance to links which are reciprocal in nature. So, at the time of link building we need to consider this as we don’t go for reciprocal links. It won’t suffice any objective. Though, in some of the cases they can still be useful if the page comes under the category of an important web page.

The next aspect of link building campaign is to build more natural links and avoid putting artificial links. This is applicable when we go for submission of our website address to different web directories. There are many differences which act as a deciding factor to search engines. Like, natural links will have different anchor names at different locations but artificial links will have same anchor text. Natural links will grow gradually while artificial links will suddenly grow in a great extent. So, be careful while going to web directories.

Few other aspects are also important to consider before submitting your website to web directories. Relevant Titles, Keywords, and Descriptions are very important. Title becomes anchor texts which are crucial because search engines utilize anchors to decide the relevance of the link. You should also avoid using advertising words like “the best”, “leading”, “leader”, “world’s leading”, etc. You should also avoid writing them in CAPS letter. These sound very small while developing a website but they become very crucial when we plan for SEO.

I’ll keep on updating this blog with my research.