Tag Archives: search engine optimization

Deathproof: Why Keywords Survive in the Age of Social Media

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Forbes.com has declared The Death of SEO.

Could it be true?

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the practice of designing websites and web content around search engines’ – mostly Google’s – algorithms, with the goal of improving search ranking for relevant keywords.

According to Forbes.com, Google has changed its search algorithm to value “social media likes, shares, tweets, reddits, and 1+” more than backlinks, which are a core component of traditional SEO.

Backlinks hold value – or used to – in search results because they indicate that other websites are referencing your content in relevant context. They’re the reason we get comment spam (a disreputable SEO agent comments on a well read article and includes a link back to the website they’re trying to optimize) and content farms (sites that contain keyword-stuffed articles with links to a different website).

Less spammy ways of getting links include guest blogging and asking reputable sites to link to you when relevant. In a sense, it’s the same as promoting your content on social media, only you don’t get the power of the crowd to re-share it and make it viral.

So what’s a small business owner to do? Should we focus on social media and forget optimizing our websites? Or is it time to redouble our SEO efforts to avoid the inevitable popularity contest on Facebook and the rest?

The answer, of course, is to do a little of everything. Google is constantly working to prevent search engine optimizers’ tricks from throwing off their results, and this is good news for your business. Content farms and comment spam may soon become a thing of the past, making way for more quality content and real online discussions and giving small business owners more opportunity to stand out.

SEO revolves around keywords, and as links fade in importance, keywords will still be, well, key. They’re the way that search engine users translate their questions to find the answers they’re looking for.

In addition to keeping your social media accounts updated, check your analytics as part of your weekly routine. Know how people search for your site, because the keywords you’re optimizing for may not be the ones people are using to find businesses like yours. Once you’ve determined which keywords produce the most traffic, work to generate sales from those customers, instead of trying to attract more searchers with broader words.

Whether they get there through social media or Google, once customers find your site, it’s your site’s job to keep them there and generate a solid lead. For this, you’ll need quality content that serves double duty as a source of keywords. And that will never die.

Is Search the Future of Language?

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Roger the ShrubberAs a ghost blogger, I often get requests to help people out with their SEO strategies. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it’s basically the science of getting to the top of Google’s search results for a given set of keywords. Let’s say your name is Roger, Roger the Shrubber, and you arrange, design and sell shrubberies in Detroit. If people searching online for “shrubbery detroit” don’t see you on the first page of results, they’re probably never going to avail themselves of your services.

People – business owners especially – start blogs for various reasons. Some want to connect with their clients by having a two-way conversation online, and use their blog as a starting point for that conversation. Others want to have some control over their business’ online image. Say a sneaky shrub competitor wrote a bad review about you on Yelp. A blog is a place to reaffirm your commitment to producing only the finest quality shrubberies with the best customer service in the city, then divert attention to your Spring Shrubbery Sale.

Then there are the search-related reasons for starting a blog. Quality web content happens to be an important component of search engine optimization. The robots that determine search results are looking for sites with more content, with the assumption that more content means a higher likelihood the searcher will find what he or she is looking for. Those ‘bots are also looking for keywords – since that’s all people get to type into the search engine box, they tend to be most important.

Since your corporate blog, from a content perspective, is just a listing of pages containing key words about your business, it wins big both for increasing the volume of information search engines see on your site and for adding keywords. Presto, higher search ranking.

It’s a bit ironic that one of the most advanced human inventions – the internet – is still completely driven by one of the first human inventions – text. Those robots can’t see your pretty images, and they don’t know that you’ve been in business fifteen years while the guy with more keywords has been doing it a month.

Don’t count on this archaic search technology to last much longer. Google is at the forefront, inventing new ways to deliver relevant results that don’t rely just on what you type in at the moment you perform a search. You may have experienced this the last time you typed in something like “ocean waves” in Google’s default web search and got results from its image search – and that was exactly what you wanted. How did they know? The answer has to do with your search history, anonymous data gleaned from millions of other searchers, and Google’s sharpened sense of context, among other things.

The latest word is that the search giant is working toward converting all human knowledge into discrete “entities”. Humans convert text to language by assigning a mental “knowledge graph” to every word we read or hear. Google is bringing artificial intelligence into play in order to actually understand text-based questions and respond in our language.

Before that happens, I’ll maintain that the best way to improve your search ranking is to add a body of relevant content to your site. But if SEO is your only goal, it’s easy to forget who your real audience is when scrambling for keywords and Meta tags aimed at search ‘bots. Make sure the text you use to get visitors to your site speaks to our human sense of language more than the search engines’. Of course, when you check for typos in your content, it helps to remember that there are two reasons to get it right.