Will Context Trump SEO Jiggering?

Jeff Jarvis posed a great discussion on the future value of search on his popular BuzzMachine blog. I say "discussion" because this was not just an isolated blog posting ... a lot of his readers left comments that added to the value of this subject. The link to the article on BuzzMachine was sent to me by Jim Robertson, product marketing manager for Cincom Smalltalk and the headline immediately caught my attention.

Here's the question Jarvis presented:

Is there a future for SEO?

Here are a few excerpts from the thought-provoking article:

In a sense, Google’s search results were the last one-size-fits-all mass product around (since most other mass media are shrinking): the first screen of results for, say, wine was the same for you as it was for me. As Google gets better at personal relevance through everything it knows about us — and it knows more and more — then your search for wine may be different from mine and there is no absolute value for placement in results and Googlejuice, no?

What does that mean to brands? The world gets confusing once more. But I think it means that true relevance becomes more important than SEO tricks. It also means that the more relationships you have with people — the more they talk about you and link to you and click on you — the better off you will be.

My comment on Jarvis' posting:

From my perspective, the SEO games we have to play to get a decent SERP too often stand in the way of writing content that is purposeful, relevant and engaging. Instead we need to make sure each page is optimized for a keyword phrase and pushing that keyword often de-optimizes writing simple, clear and understandable content.

As Google gets better at recognizing contextual relevance to a particular customer, we will now be encouraged to write more and more helpful customer-centric content. That will result in a better customer experience and a better relationship with those vendors who show an understanding of customer needs.

As a searcher myself, I want to get to content that is helpful to me. Too often, my personal searches do not bring back the content I want … at least not on Page One. I find myself frequently going out in the long tail to find the good stuff that will help me do my work better. The content in the long tail mostly is not jiggered for SEO, but is written about the subjects I want to learn more about.

SEO won’t go away, but it will get better. And as a web writer, I won’t have to calculate keyword density. Writing is hard work but it will be more rewarding when it can stay focused on the customer instead of the spider.

Comments

[Karen E.]

Within the context of the BuzzMachine blog responses, Dale really did address other angles. I agree with Dale's statements and think that SEO is important, but drawing attention away from good writing towards our customers and not for writing for the webcrawler.