Posted By
Wesley Picotte on 06/09/2009
A colleague recently shared a declaration made by Hewlett Packard's
Community Manager who, citing the growing role social media channels have in
providing content that search engines can index and associate to keyword
searches, declared (paraphrasing) that SEO
as we know it today will be dead in six months.
I think not. Search engine algorithms are formulated to not allow specific
content types to hold too great a sway over natural search performance. When an
engine like Google recognizes the proliferation of specific content
types—twitter feeds, for example—that potentially are influencing search
performance in an undue manner, algorithms are refined.
Further, not all products and services are tweeted or blogged about. At White
Horse, some of our clientele don’t register widely within social media
channels because they're so niche. Yes, it's true, there's a blog out there for
everyone and if not for you then start one—today, for free. But SEO and its
long-standing tenets will remain as relevant as ever for such organizations
because most of the time, their site content has more value to the search
engine than intermittent blips on the social media radar.
To be sure, social media has a growing role in SEO.
It's an important one, too, and at White Horse, our Emerging
Media practice leverages blog seeding, Twitter, YouTube, and other channels
on a regular basis to achieve both awareness and traffic-driving goals. These
tactics, while not necessarily prescribed as a component of SEO, most certainly
can impact natural search performance. But they should be considered as tools
available to the SEO, not search engine optimization itself.
The reality is that most organizations with something to sell use Web sites
to accomplish their goals. Meaning, there's a digital destination for their
customers and prospects. For search engines to determine an association between
this destination and social media content, it needs to be optimized. So fret
not all you SEOs, you're not out of a job anytime soon. Just be prepared for
how social media and future phenomenon will change how you go about search
engine optimization.
Tags: social networks, organic search
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