Why do we spend so much time focusing on search engine optimisation when perhaps we should be looking at content optimisation?
Time and again I hear how good seo will improve our page rank, will bring us crowds and cover us in gold. And I'm sure it has a role to play.
But the internet is about people pointing at stuff that they feel is worthy of their advocacy. And one thing is for sure: No one points at seo.
Seo is no purple cow (seth godin). But your content and services can be.
Content, as Cory Doctorow put it so well, is to give us something to spark up conversations. It is what people of shared interests want to talk about. Which is why it inspires us to point at it, raising a flag that we are ready to engage in a conversation about it (the simple url links in twitter write this large.
So if you want more relevant visitors, give them better unique things to talk about.
One point-worthy thing a month that no-one else has contributed has so much more value than a 1000 press-releases that can be found in manifold other locations on the web. People might find your version of the press release – but why would they point at you, rather than the other x thousands?
It is the role of media brands to present something point-worthy, something you can't find elsewhere, something that is hard for anyone else to do. Focus on that.
Layer some good seo on that and you may find more relevant people willing to point at you. But don't put the cart before the horse.
The further ahead you look - the faster you go | davidpcushman AT gmail.com | These are my views and my views only.
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The rate of change is so rapid it's difficult for one person to keep up to speed. Let's pool our thoughts, share our reactions and, who knows, even reach some shared conclusions worth arriving at?
Content is, and always will be, king.
ReplyDeleteTrue, content will always be what drives people to your site.
ReplyDeleteSEO is content optimisation - optimising your content so that search engines can find it and then people can find it and point to it. (At least the white hat kind is.) Certainly there has to be something there to optimise, but it doesn't matter how good your content is if no one sees it. Consider motorcyclenews.com, which in a previous life didn't rank for "motorbike reviews" because Google didn't even know that its motorbike reviews existed. They could be the best reviews on the web, but people would still be pointing to the second-best because that's the best they could find to recommend.
ReplyDeleteSteve, I don't think its as simple as that. I do think being pointed at by a human has more value than being pointed at by a machine. cite links in twitter directed through networks of trust. People you trust are much more able to point you to what you need than seo. Take your point about being able to be found by a search engine. If the mcn reviews were the best enough people would create a network of people believing so to do the pointing for those for whom this is relevant. Ultimately a link I can trust beats a link at the top of the list.
ReplyDeleteIt's certainly true that networks of trust are the best way for knowledge of content to spread - Google will never kill servers in the way that Slashdot, Digg and Reddit do. But how does that knowledge get into your network in the first place? And even when my network has told me that MCN is the best place for bike reviews I'll have to be careful to save the link if typing "MCN Honda CBR600 review" into Google won't get me back there. Remember that people use Google even if they know where they want to go - it's just easier than remembering an address.
ReplyDeleteFunnily enough, the top item on Reddit at the moment is "Vote up if you have ever found a good story on reddit and couldn't find it later cause you didn't bookmark it and the search sucks". I shall label this Exhibit A, m'lud.
ReplyDeleteYou made me smile!
ReplyDeleteok where does that take us.
Perhaps one can swop 'and the search sucks' for 'and no one in my network of trust had seen it/saved it/pointed at it/had a conversation about it'?
or even 'and everyone I know can't find it either' (subtext, can't have been that good/relevant/useful to us then, can it?)
What I'm trying to say is a group of people who found it useful have a better chance of discovering and collectively recalling its location than an individual - using search alone.
Your go! :)
Ah, but good SEO makes it easier for anyone in that group to recall it - just tap some of the title into Google rather than producing the entire URL from memory. Of course you may need the help of the group to recall enough of the title for Google to find it. Get your SEO really wrong and you might as well just leave the content on your hard drive and let people email you for a copy when it's been recommended to them. Sure it'll work, but why make life harder than it should be? The content that gets pointed to may then be the one that's easier to recall rather than the best.
ReplyDeleteTo pick a random example, if I want to direct someone to this post I might put "david cushman less focus on seo" into Google. I find this blog's home page (lovely, but once the post is a little older I'll still be digging through the archives to find what I really wanted) and this post from 2006. (It's not hard to explain why Google failed here, but this <textarea> is, as they say, too small to contain it.)
I think my issue here is that "search" engines really get used for two things - discovery and navigation. The discovery stage is certainly better served by real people in the form of networks of trust. No machine can tell you which car you should buy next, despite my best efforts to convince the machine otherwise.
However, search is also used for navigation when you know what you want, and a machine should be quite capable of handling this bit. If I say to someone "check out David's 'Less Focus on SEO' post", shouldn't Google be able to get him there without him asking me for a link when he gets back to his computer? Handing this navigation role to my friends feels a little like deciding that I won't have bookmarks in my browser or save numbers in my phone because I can always ask someone. Remembering is something that machines are way better at than people, as long as a little care is given when we tell them what to remember.
So, people for discovery, machines for recall?
ReplyDeleteThis I like.
I see a crowd recommending a book to read and a robot rushing to retrieve it from the shelves.
But I wonder if the metaphor works with less discreet forms of 'knowledge' and/or information.
eg what is the colour red? Can the robot tag that? Will we need something more crowd-sourced and fuzzy? Can search achieve that.
Text based search sounds, from your well put argument Steve, ideal for a text based internet.
Where do you see things moving as the web becomes both more semantic in nature and in content?
I think that search stays text-based not so much because the content is text-based, but because your keyboard is text-based. If you could work out how to type in the colour red, then a machine could search for it pretty much as easily as the word red. Machines already do a good job of identifying a song when your "search term" is a few seconds of it recorded on your mobile.
ReplyDeleteIt's not unlike trying to translate languages. When you type "dog" into Google but want pictures of dogs, it's like typing "dog" and wanting French pages about dogs. Here you do need some crowd-sourcing, but you want to use it to teach the machine a new language once rather than to find French pages about dogs every time they're requested. Once the machine can relate what you asked for ("dog") to what it's been given to remember (a load of French pages) then the recall bit is still easier for machines than for people.
That's largely how Google Translate works - it finds pages that are available in multiple languages and decides that if "chien" usually appears near to where "dog" was in the English versions, that must be the French for dog. In effect it's drawing on the collective work of all the people who translated those pages to do new translations.
Google Image Search does the same thing - the images that most often appear on pages with the word "dog" in must be the image "translation" of dog because all those pages' authors can't be wrong. Their Image Labeler is a bit more explicit in recruiting help - while it's presented as a game, in effect it's showing you French words and asking you to type in the English so that Google can learn the translation.