Web 2.0 Search - SEO is out, SMO is in
Leading Internet search engines have begun incorporating social media tools
to meet the niche needs of the ‘long tail’ market
Move over SEO, SMO has arrived. With Internet users contributing, tagging
and ranking content in Web 2.0, search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and
Altavista have been compelled to re-engineer their algorithms to incorporate
social media search. As a result, search engine optimization (SEO) is giving
way to social media optimization (SMO).
Before the advent of Web 2.0, Internet users depended heavily on search engines
that crawled the web, looked for ‘meta tags’ and threw up results on the basis
of ‘key words’ ‘key phrases’ and in-bound and out-bound ‘links’.
This logic gave rise to the burgeoning business of stuffing websites with ‘key
words’ and ‘incestuous link-exchange’ alliances with a view to ensuring a good
search engine result page.
Web 2.0 has changed all this.
With Internet users starting to play key role in generating and ranking content,
websites that drew power from stuffed keywords became ‘untouchable’. Search
engines were quick to detect this fraudulent way of websites to gain top page
rankings and started treating them as ‘spam’.
After all, the prime role of search engines is to meet the information needs
of Internet users. Realizing that ‘spamming’ was becoming a scourge of the
Internet, search engines were compelled to study the behavior patterns of users.
A close study of user behavior prompted leading search engines to reformulate
their algorithms to incorporate what is known as ‘semantic’ search. The search
behavior of users has become the determining factor for deciding the algorithms
of most of the popular search engines.
Many global players are trying to incorporate social search in their search
tools to drive high traffic. For instance, Yahoo’s My Web 2.0 social search
service looks at search through an entirely new lens.
Common to all Web search today is emphasis on ‘link analysis’: the more incoming
links to a given site, the greater its weight in search results. However, Yahoo’s
social search has shifted the emphasis to the opinions of a searcher’s friends
and colleagues from the links of other Web publishers. Similarly, MSN too plans
to unveil its social search tool in near future.
The popular Wikipedia, which has almost caused the death for Encyclopedia,
too is planning to come up with a search engine, ‘wikia search’, that follows
the semantic map of user’s behavior.
In the face of rising social searches, what then brings traffic to a website
is the focus on long tail keywords, popular tags, and an in-depth research
of the behavior of social sites.
It is precisely for this reason that Web 2.0 portals like Digg, Furl, Reditt,
and other book-marking sites, which evolve around the concept of ‘semantic
search’, are fast gaining popularity.
A social search engine throws up more semantic results because it follows the
collective wisdom of Internet users – human intelligence rather than cold mathematical
logic.
This has made the task of SEO firms more challenging, as these now need to
put in extra efforts to optimize the websites for social search engines as
well. The new challenge before SEOs in the Web 2.0 era is how to make the content
of websites popular among online communities through social media.
This would entail convergence of the algorithmic search and semantic search.
