I’m a little cranky at the moment.
I want to fast forward the internet. Either that or sleep through the next 5-10 years.
This SEO stuff is getting me down. I know things are always changing, but at this point they can’t change fast enough for me.
A depressingly large subsection of the internet seems all too willing to prostrate itself at the altar of the great SEO diety. If you want the right customers to see your products, you need to have a great search rank, and that means you need the right keywords in the right places, plenty of backlinks, active comment boards, a constant stream of fresh content, and the list goes on.
Few businesses seem to be looking to the future rather than directly at the ground in front of them. Search engine rankings, in their current incarnation, won’t be around for long.
While they are still somewhat ill-defined concepts, the “semantic web” and “web 3.0″ seem to be aiming for an internet not limited by what’s placed within constraining HTML tags–the current basis for search engine rankings. The forward thinkers at the World Wide Web Consortium envision an internet where machines understand one another more like human beings do–that is to say, less in terms of specially designated tags and more in terms of meaningful context. At present, if I tell Google I have a website about hippos, it asks me to put the word “hippo” into about a dozen different boxes, put the boxes in the right place, tie a string between my boxes and other peoples’ hippo boxes put something new in the box every day, and paint the box with a picture of a hippo. Then, and only then, will the rest of the world know about my hippo website.
When I tell you I have a website about hippos, you instantly form a picture in your head of what my site might be like. In other words, your brain is already semantic. The web gurus want Google to be more like your brain. And when you ask Google for hippo websites, it doesn’t have to think about the boxes, strings, and paint jobs. Instead, it can say, “Mkay, but what kind? Like do you want pictures or facts? Obscure? Funny? Cartoons? Do you need it for a paper? Or are you just bored? Talk to me.”
Let me put it another way. During the punched card era, when a computer program literally consisted of a box of cards placed in just the right order, if you removed a single card the entire program was ruined. Now you can type “Skee Ball Cha” into Google and it’s already guessed you want to know about skee ball championships and dug up hundreds of websites to cater to your fancy. Now try to imagine how today’s Google will make similar advances over the next several years. Everything is marching towards an internet that “understands” users instead of simply reading a series of punched cards (or HTML tags).
Yet online businesses seem all to happy to invest in hole-punching technology. The recent fall of Ezine is a fine example. Prior to January of 2011, when Google implemented its “Farmer” search algorithm update. Ezine Articles often ranked very high in a number of searches. Ask Google how to hang a picture, and one of the first five results would be an Ezine article about it. Ezine played the game well, pumping out tidal waves of content with all the right things in its boxes and all the right strings tied up. Were the articles any good? Did they actually provide useful instruction on how to hang a picture? With little exception, no. Articles composed by authors being paid little to nothing to churn out keyword-rich garbage attracted plenty of traffic but left most users disappointed by the lack of real knowledge being imparted.
Then Farmer hit, and Ezine all but disappeared from the search rankings overnight, as well it should have. Google found ways to make the algorithm more complex and prevent people from gaming the system as Ezine had done. As we speak, some of the nation’s best web engineers are devising new ways to outsmart would-be opportunists eager to make a quick buck by giving search engines all of the nectar but none of the fruit.
Some companies, however, and looking ahead. They focus on providing well-composed, well-researched, meaningful content without worrying too much about mechanistic SEO. They may not get instant legions of traffic by showing up on every single first page for every single Google search pertaining to their markets, but they get bookmarked, revisited, blogged about, and respected.
In the offline world, people with something of value to say generally find themselves with bigger audiences than blathering morons (I know, I know, Twilight/Rush Limbaugh/Snooki/etc. exist, but let’s not get too cynical just yet). That’s how I optimistically view the future of the web. The more semantic it grows, the more intuitive and refined, the more it will become able to recognize, appreciate, and promote real, meaningful content. So why base your marketing efforts on ethically questionable and ultimately doomed tactics?
Let’s get back to the basics. Be a merchant–provide something of value to your customers. Do what you can to get the word out concerning your business, but keep the focus on providing things that will truly help them live better lives. No matter how many startups enjoy meteoric rises by seizing on holes and flaws in the market, they almost all share a destitute fate.
