Best SEO

SEO and major players

Recently, a number of web market specialists came up with some puzzling assertion: SEO is dead! Let’s take a look behind the curtains and try to find out what lies behind their declarations. In one of my recent previous posts on this blog I said that SEO – the way we knew it – would die soon. Major players like Google, Bing and Yahoo reacted somewhat slow and with no appropriate strategy to the recent configuration of the Web. Yahoo has had for a while some community centered approach, Bing is quite new on the scene and Google had a powerful community but rather for the initiated users than for average web surfer. Yahoo strengthened, step be step, on quite a regular basis, the social side of its service, while Google extended the concept of its own social media, trying to mimic/ follow the social media trends.

http://videos.webpronews.com/2010/03/11/the-death-or-redefinition-of-seo-discussed/

But there is a new factor that we should take into account by now: mobile search and mobile apps. Java ME and similar platforms made it a piece of cake for developers to build their own search apps even to implement new web search algorithms. Some of the relies on Google API but some others are building their onw search engines and web databases.  All 3 SEs giants are doing well on this  round, as they launched their own mobile gadgets (read: mobile devices) and apps in order to stand out the rising competition and enforce positions on the market.

Theoretically, Microsoft had a major advantage, at least from the start, but maybe at this point Apple took the lead with iPhone and iPad, though Google is doing well with Android and Nexus.

Why SEO turns to SO

Till now, it was pretty easy to optimize for SEs a site, even after the meta tags were out of equation: it was all about some standard on page items and inbound links (IBLs). Now, we can clearly see how the search market became fragmented, each player striving to get the best slice of the pie. Big companies understood quite fast the importance of the newcomers and built consistent strategies for all search environments. This is why some folks talk now about Search Optimization instead of Search Engine Optimization. However, those who claims the death of SEO, tend to forget that SEs are smart enough to control (which is index) the content of any major web player. At a certain point, maybe social media leaders  will try to control tighter the access of SEs to their content, or even to deny it and build their own SEs. Would that be a smart move for them?  Hard to say… Same story with mobile search apps.

What we should do

It’ obvious at this point that SEO became rather Search Optimization (SO), in order to keep up with the evolution of Web. IMO, it’s less probable that Social Media will try to get rid of SEs. Even if there are lots of search web apps, the capacity of Google, Bing and Yahoo of gathering and sorting data is huge and cannot be beaten easily by whatever  comer. Therefore, on page optimization and good content will still be the backbone for ranking well on any kind of search, as all search service providers will want to provide relevant results for their clients. Even without internal PageRank, back links are good, as they increase the traffic and visibility of a site. Placing more content on social media sites, media centered portals (video and photo especially) it’s a good choice for SO and will definitely reflect on SEs.

My personal belief is that social media is a bubble which is not going to last too long, at least in it’s actual format, but Search Engines are the strong entities and they are going to rule the web long time from now on.

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