Rumors of SEO’s death is greatly over exaggerated. Assessing the relevance of search engine optimization comes up more than often. Want to know why? Just Google “SEO is Dead” and you will see so many predictions made by different techies which are completely wrong.
What these techies are trying to say that the principle which is underneath the foundation of SEO about how user search for, and retrieve, relevant information on the internet is changing dramatically. And this is not just a challenge for SEO engineers. Anyone trying to get their online content seen through Google must also know the new form of retrieval by Google.
With Google providing results for more than two million searches per second it can be said that the competition is on life support.
Figures may vary but it is said that 90% of users are preferring Google as their primary search engine. The American multinational founded by Sergey Brin and Larry Page enjoys the same kind of universal brand awareness as companies such as Hoover did in previous times.
This is great for Google. For consumer of digital information, having no competition is a serious threat to healthy information. We may think we’re searching the internet, but we are searching Google’s version of the internet.
Virtual Monopoly
It is a cause for concern that the only search engine Google has a virtual monopoly on how information is being made available on mankind, but most people are interested in their place in this information flow. Technology has a habit of moving faster than what we can keep up. Recent advances are keeping Google’s digital librarians very busy indeed. “Emerging technologies like AR and VR in the context of SEO, are creating new challenges for engineers at Google,” explains Glick.
The fundamentals still need to be strong, though, “Concentrate on the stuff that’s still important: title and description tags, making sure you have good, relevant content that relates to your business model, plenty of media, videos, soundbites and text. All of this content in indexable.”
The written word has been under attack for a long time from all corners. From all websites such as Instagram and Pinterest, the move is to reduce the text from newspapers and website and replacing it with more imagery. But words still command great authority in the digital world. “The easiest way for a computer to understand content is still for it to be written,” says Glick.
VR and AR and other such technologies can add tremendous value to a website, allowing for more interesting content and navigability. But SEO architects are still looking at how to index this kind of data. Until they do so, it may be a hindrance more than anything else. “Regardless of how advanced your site may be, if no one can find it, it won’t be seen,” says Glick. “The expansion of technologies like VR and AR have the ability to totally mess up your indexing if overused. But, Google is constantly working on tools and better ways to approach new types of data.”
Breaking the Mould
We all see the internet through Google’s eyes. The company has been around for 18 years so that means a generation of individuals have learnt how to search the internet via Google. “The ability to step out of this mould is difficult to do,” says Glick.
Glick does not see any foreseeable changes in this technique in the near future. “We definitely won’t be changing any of our patterns any time soon, “ he says. That doesn’t mean that Google has reached critical mass and is unstoppable. Even digital natives like millenials- and the generation following them will be in a stronger positions, digitally speaking, to question the SEO status quo. We have seen big companies fall in the recent past only because of their own ego. While heavily investing in the top spot, Google may fall upon its own sword.
According to Rand Fishkin, chief executive and cofounder of SEOmoz- considered as a thought leader in the field of SEO tools , resources and community, Google’s success thus far has been its commitment to searcher satisfaction rather than advertiser satisfaction as its priority.
