Search Engine Optimization

Google has been the number one search engine for many years with Yahoo! and the rest, not trailing behind, but languishing. Because of Google’s dominance, search engine optimisation has centred around the algorithms that go into Google’s organic search rankings. To a degree, this has made life easier – it has also made life more difficult.

Because Google is so far in front, spammers concentrate on its search rankings. Every now and then, Google makes a change to its algorithm, perhaps decides to penalise certain habits (like paid links several years ago) or to boost other areas (such as social media). Now that’s fine, except that often the little players get caught in the crossfire and suddenly find their hard work coming undone.

There is talk that Yahoo! is on its last legs. It seems to me it has been ‘on its last legs’ for many years now. Perhaps Bing can finally kill it off. The end result will not be a better internet–if anything, it will become poorer–not because of Yahoo! disappearing, but because of the lack of competition.

If we had four or five strong search engines, the competition would be much better. More importantly, spammers would have a tougher time. Five strong search engines mean five different sets of algorithms. I am not sure that spammers would have such an easy time. An even bigger issue are the search results themselves.

I am not sure if many searchers have noticed the changes creeping into the search results these days. I have mentioned it before; if you actually look at search results, they are becoming compartmentalised. You have image results grouped together, likewise video, news, products and local business (local search). What’s next? Will blogs be removed from organic search and get a little compartment of their own? Commerce, articles; where does it stop? Search results will become a page of compartments each dedicated to a particular segment.

That could be good for the user, it may be good for some sectors of the web, but I am not sure it is going to be good for the web as a whole. Competition has proven to be the best innovator and the only way to provide a quality service. Monopolies rarely have the interests of anyone except the self–and Google is becoming a large Googopoly. What are your thoughts–is a single all powerful search engine good for the internet?

Blogging is one of the most popular activities online these days and the lines are becoming blurred between social media, social bookmarking and traditional blogging. There are bookmarking sites like Tumblr that allow ‘blog’ entries and there has been a suggestion that Facebook incorporate a blog feature as well. I see nothing wrong with this; in fact, the more outlets there are for people to blog, the better.

However, when it comes to a business, blogging for the sake of blogging could be a negative. I can only see two reasons for a business to incorporate a blog. One is to open communication with customers and the second is to provide SEO benefits. For either one, blogging has still got to provide a worthwhile experience.

Customers, or potential customers, won’t hang around or return to your blog if the content is useless to them. Likewise, if search engines see nothing but keyword-stuffed blog posts with links to all your important pages, they won’t give it the authority it needs to build those pages.

It is not difficult to create content that is both useful to your visitors and of value to develop authority. Well-written content will, over time, develop natural inbound links. These links are an essential part of that authority development.

Rather than blogging without direction, put together a game plan for your blog. It can work for both visitor satisfaction and SEO purposes. You can then incorporate some of the social blogging platforms that are developing that can act like funnels, first bringing traffic to your blog, then channeling that traffic to your site’s ‘money’ pages. Get it right and everyone wins, get it wrong and blog for the sake of blogging, with content that is really worthless, and no one wins, least of all your business.