Posts Tagged ‘Facebook surpasses Google’

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.