That's right. Ruination.
I happened across a recent blog post
that condemns the increased frequency with which online marketing
experts are recommending the use of social media sites as a means to
influence search engine results. The thinking goes that hordes of
SEO-types are infiltrating the social web seeking to leverage the
platform to generate back-links to their
maybe-sometimes-but-not-that-often relevant content.
Well,
I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but it's not just the social
media sites that are at risk. The situation described above is merely a
symptom of a much larger issue. The real problem stems from Relevancy, how it's computed by the search engines, and the SEO industry it has spawned.
(as an aside, any term that can be used freely as a noun, verb, and adjective in the same sentance has to be suspect. I'm an SEO performing SEO so my client's site will be SEO).
What am I talking about, you say? Here's the crux of it - "Relevancy" is a subjective concept that the search engines are attempting to determine by objective means. You cannot determine a qualitative measure by using a purely quantitative analysis.
And
so what's happened is this. With the exception of the farthest reaches
of the long-tail, adding your target keywords (or phrases) to your
Title and Meta Tags and on page copy and then throwing in some H1s and
BOLD tags for good measure cannot enable the search engines to
determine the most relevant page for any search term given the fact
that there are likely hundreds of other sites out there that have done
the same thing for the same search terms. So what we're left with,
then, is Page Rank.
By now, the Google Page Rank Algorithm
is widely known. Simply put, the more back-links you have, preferably
from high-ranking pages, the higher your own page rank will be. In an
environment that is as content-rich and comptetive as, well, the entire
internet, simply publishing a piece of content and hoping it gets
noticed and hoping further that the good-folks of the web will
graciously bestow upon your content bundles of back-links is wishful
thinking indeed.
In
a more traditional marketing model, a product is produced and then
marketed. Clever or Sexy or Serious advertisements are created and
distributed through various media. Much of which is online these days -
"banner" advertising is far from dead, especially as broadband
penetration deepens and rich media ads become more pervasive.
Historically, (pre-internet), TV and Radio and Print were the primary
distribution vehicles, but the effectiveness of these was (is) hard to
measure. With internet-based advertising eveything became trackable and
the numbers were appalling (1% Click-Thru rates!).
Google
revolutionized internet advertising through contextualized CPC ads.
Suddenly advertisers were given control over when their ad was shown
and could determine how much they were willing to pay for the
acquisition of that online visitor. Highly measurable, ROI could easily
be determined and in many cases even an arbitrage was created.
And
then everybody looked to their left a little. And what they saw were
the natural search results, just sitting there, promising free traffic.
No CPC, if only my site was on the front page....
Thus was SEO born.
And
so what happens? In an attempt to overcome the fact that 1000 other
websites are using the same keywords in Title and Meta tags, etc., the
diligent SEO goes on a link building campaign. The objective search
engine bot spiders and picks up links mostly indiscriminently, and the
hard-working SEO knows this, so just about any link is a good link
(and, man, those social media sites sure are great places to build
links).
If
you follow this closely enough, SEO really becomes a game of trying to
convince (fool) the search engines that your content is more "relevant"
than somebody else's.
If
I hire 1000 people in the Ukraine to spam the social media sites, does
that make me more relevant? If I succumb to the daily phone calls from
the company that wants me to pay bloggers to write about my content and
provide back-links, does that make me more relevant? Or what if I
simply buy Text Link ads? Maybe these are considered "black hat," but
they're only taking a perfectly acceptable SEO practice to it's logical
extreme.
And it happens every day.
I'll
admit that "Ruination" is a strong word. But the current notion of
relevancy is broken and an entire industry has sprung up to take
advantage of the situation.
