Brand and Capture

Is Your SEO Strategy Tragically Flawed?

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We focus so much on "getting found online" that we forget the most important aspect of search, aligning the interests of searchers and search results. If you're a searcher you want to find the best results that really match the intent of your search. If you're a website or blog, you want people finding your site who are really interested in what you have to say or sell. Why is it so hard to match the needs of the surfer and the surfed?

Flaw #1

We the publishers worry too much about the general problem of online visibility and too little about "fishing where the fish are". We try to optimize our pages on keywords that we think are the most likely to draw in large amounts of traffic. Never mind that many of these keywords have little or nothing to do with our real business. For example, we worry too much about the keyword phrase "inbound marketing". Sure, we provide inbound marketing services, but we don't create software or host conferences or any of the myriad other subjects associated with this phrase. We want people to find us who are looking for "inbound marketing services", so that's what we ought to focus on, right? So what if we only get 10 visits a month on that search? If one or two of them convert to customers, we're in business, literally.

Flaw #2

We worry so much about on-page optimization that we destroy our content. Yep, we do this too. Guilty as charged. If your blog reads like a bunch of keywords, where's the meaning? Where's the art? More importantly, who's going to enjoy your blog enough to subscribe to it and come back for more? What do you think of blogs that are loaded with obvious keywords and tons of internal links? That's what I thought, you move on as quickly as possible and curse the author for wasting your time. What's the goal of publishing? Who are you trying to reach and how well are you communicating your ideas? These should take precedence over keywords and links, SEO or no SEO.

Flaw #3

We stress over SEO results. Yes, we all do this. It's completely insane. If your website is for business, it's all about leads and customers, not about uniques and Google page rank. You can have the most traffic in the universe, but if you're not getting lots of repeat visitors who convert to leads and customers, why bother? What's the point? A better strategy is to look for relationships, not statistics.

Moral of the Story

The good news is that all of this can be fixed just by thinking about your strategy and making real changes to your approach. Think about your customers. What do they want and how do they find you online? Don't know? Ask them. Study the ways your customers find you via search and focus on those keywords and phrases. Forget about the shotgun approach. Next, focus on providing great content. Lose the mechanical SEO-rich style and get real. Finally, relax and work the relationships, not the data.

I'm expecting scathing comments from all you SEO's, so bring it!

Google Real-Time Search and Its Impact on SEO

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If you haven't already checked out Google Real-Time Search, just go do this:

• Go to http://google.com/trends
• Add "tiger woods" to the search box titled "More Hot Topics" at the bottom of the left column and click the "Search Latest" button
  
• When your results come up, click "Updates" in the left-hand column

Now watch the real-time Twitter tweets and Facebook, MySpace , YouTube, and Friendfeed updates as well as blog results roll in. Pretty amazing, huh? This is Google Real-Time Search. What does it mean?

It means that Google is now grabbing all of this information from social media as well as websites, indexing it and making it available in seconds anywhere, anytime. To be fair, Bing and Yahoo plan to add this capability as well, but Google is out there now. The implications are mind-blowing. Here are a few that come to mind:

1. Your "reach" in social media and search engines has just been expanded several light years.
2. Anything you say online is now available to everyone else (not just people who follow your updates) within seconds
3. If you contribute to a "hot topic", your 15 microseconds of fame starts now
4. How will Google deal with the mountains of spam that will erupt with this new tool? How will it decide what is spam and what is useful information?

Another major impact will be search engine optimization. It's not clear yet how real-time search will affect website page rank and other SEO-related factors. If you add a keyword-rich tweet with a link to a page on your website, will you get SEO credit? Will people start to flood Twitter and other social media sites with keywords instead of meaningful discussions? These are all hot topics for discussion and bear watching over the next few months as this technology develops and becomes more mainstream.

What are your thoughts and experiences with real-time search?