SEO has been a mystic factor for any blogger or internet marketer for over a decade now. The ones who conquer this art are considered sorcerers. My talk at Wordcamp Mumbai would discuss my experience doing SEO, getting over 30 million visitors to my web properties over the years and the fallacy of search engine optimizers.
It is a fact that any large internet player won’t be as powerful without effective SEO. Be it travel sites like Expedia or e-commerce giants like Amazon / Flipkart, SEO is a core part of their existence. Of course there are outliers like Google & Facebook themselves. So while I agree that SEO is a must have on the internet, I would challenge the way we think about SEO at my talk at Wordcamp this weekend. For the ones looking at a talk where a SEO champ comes and speaks about how to do effective SEO, this talk isn’t for you. My talk revolves around what is search engine, how it works, why one does SEO & how we have been thinking about it wrongly for such a long time now!
Understanding Search Engine
What is a search engine? A tool to market your website, get more visitors? Let’s discuss why search engines exist and what they are meant to do. With our collective understanding we would also try to understand how they work and stay effective on the www with trillions of websites to rank.
Why SEO?
So why does one need to do SEO? Why not call people? SMS them? Go to their doors and sell your content / service / product? What is SEO treated like a mythical beast and considered black magic? Is it really a free way to market?
SEO Is a subset / outcome of marketing, not the only strategy
The larger picture. How we should think of SEO. This includes SEO being a subset of a larger marketing strategy, putting the user first and realizing the SEO is now the solution to world peace. Businesses have to figure a way to survive without having a need to rely on a single third party to give them all their customers. While it is the truth that a lot of Internet companies would become unviable if search engines were not to exist, but a paid funnel to grow your business on the Internet is a must. In context of content players, having a dedicated following, social reach, syndication and possibly content that can be monetized by subscription fees is the way to go.
While SEO would remain important, doing everything else and reducing your reliance on SEO would actually help your SEO itself. That’s how the science of SEO seems to be working today. Let’s talk about it in detail at Wordcamp Mumbai 2014!
Slideshow: Annkur Agarwal’s “No SEO, A More powerful way to do SEO with WordPress”.