Online Marketing for Search engines or Humans?
Posted by iMark | Under Internet Marketing - An Overview Tuesday Mar 18, 2008Ask a layman, “Who do you think are websites made for?” and I am sure the prompt reply would be, “of course humans”. Ask a web developer or a webmaster, who does he think of while developing a website, and I am sure the reply would be “Search engines and humans”.
Websites were always meant for humans. But as time progressed and the number of pages on the internet started growing exponentially, it became difficult to locate them. There entered the Search engines and something happened that changed the way people used internet: Google.
Fast forward to the present scenario. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) became more of a norm than an option. Any serious webmaster or business owner will make sure to put as much efforts as possible to please the Google algorithm to hog the maximum attention by getting in the first page of search results. I do not mean to belittle SEO efforts in any manner whatsoever. It has remained and will continue to be an important tool to get your website closer to netizens.
But somewhere down the line the real target audience (humans) of the web took a backseat and it was the search engines for which majority of efforts were directed to, sometimes at the cost of content. Therefore I always like to call SEO as online marketing for search engines.
But then web evolved further and we had social networking sites and social book marking sites. Social networks are a rage, anybody would testify to this fact. Millions of users around the world visit orkut, facebook, myspace. Just imagine the kind of ready audience available at these platforms. I strongly feel in near future marketing on social forums would be a prime method of marketing and not just an option. Webmasters and business owners should concentrate on putting quality content on their websites, which is appealing to the audience and warrants attention and repeat visits. And then having done that, put efforts to devise sustained market campaigns on these forums with equal vigor as they do in their offline marketing campaigns currently. And this especially will benefit to service providers who are ready for customers from a global marketplace.
And who knows if search engines start indexing and searching social network pages in near future, the marketing possibilities on these networks will rise exponentially.
[…] Mark wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptTherefore I always like to call SEO as online marketing for search engines. But then web evolved further and we had social networking sites and social book marking sites. Social networks are a rage, anybody would testify to this fact. … […]
Good post. I have been saying for years that SEO is a diversion that has little, if any, benefit to online business. You can make your web site as search engine friendly as possible and get the highest ranks possible. But that does not pay the bills. Only when people buy from a web site is it effective. And search engines don’t buy - humans do. Hence, aiming your web site at humans is much, much more important than SEO. Indeed, Google itself points this out in its advice to webmasters in which it clearly says you should prepare web site for humans, not search engines.
The thing is, that because companies find it difficult to write good copy because they do not invest enough time, money or energy into it, they clutch at any straws to help improve their online effectiveness. SEO sounds technical, it offers a “solution” or so it seems and you can show some “results” by increased rankings. But it’s a solution to the wrong problem. Getting high ranking in search engines is of little benefit to companies. Getting human interaction is the goal. Hence you are quite right that concentrating on people is by far the most important thing to do.
I wrote an article recentlty on the subject of marketing for search engines vs marketing for humans… At the end of the day, with the way googles algorithms are evolving to account for the human searchers one will often find that marketing for people will, by extension, mean website optimised for search engines…
Basically you have to find that ever elusive balance… SEO is great, but getting people to your site won’t help if your site can’t offer them anything they want
I believe the current requirements for making your website search engine optimized are same as making your web content useful for humans.
Optimizing your website and making it “stand-out” in search engine results is same as optimizing yourself as a person and making yourself standout in society.
First step is to know yourself - & then communicate your true self to the world. For a website that means having useful content, having that content as close to all meta tags specified, inbound linking to right/related content, having up-to-date site map, etc.
Second step is to be social. Have good spotless friends with related interests and good reputation. And of course when you are a good person and have good influential friends you will talk about them and word will get around about you too! And that’s what the outbound links and links on related/reputed sites do.
So its my belief that if you start with good content - that is targeted to humans you are actually working towards good SEO too. You might have to steer away from some platforms like Flash, but there are multiple other SE compliant methods. Make the main focus Humans, and Search Engines will definitely reward you.
Social websites, such as this one are being notated in the search engines. I agree that just adding your site to a search engine is not enough. We all need to think outside of the box and explore all of the poosibilites.
Sandi