SEO is overhyped

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. 

13 replies on “SEO is overhyped”

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  3. Thanesh on

    …dude Social media is nothing …its all Facebook vs Google …the rest of em can go to sleep …btw how many materials/things/objects have you bought using some info from Facebook? LOL …and calling it a waste …well …thats a bit over the top!

  4. @Thanesh – It would be waste when traffic diversion from social media channels will take over Google. The process has already started. And, it’s not just Facebook, StumbleUpon surpassed Google in driving traffic [last week’s stats from statcounter].

    As far as buying things are concern – we go to watch movies after getting reviews on Twitter. Most of the articles we read are through shared links of our friends on Facebook. Sometimes we also buy books when it is recommended by a friend on Twitter / Facebook.

    The concept of Groupon and Quora are also going to rule the future business.

    Stay Tuned for more happenings at social business arena !

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  9. very much agree with you Nitesh.
    Great post and yes the future of search will be social and people have stared taking it that way.

  10. Kamanashish on

    Traffic from social media! Cool …
    What about conversion rate?
    Don’t forget there are mainly 2 types of visitors – information seekers and buyers looking for a solution … If your website belongs to the first category, FB traffic is as good as anything … What if you need to sell a product and you are not as big as amazon?

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