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Sunday, February 7, 2010

Will SMO take over SEO?

Nowadays there is a speculation in the internet industry that SEO is going to be dead and social networking websites will take over SEO.

Since inbound links are the main criteria to generate traffic to any website, and social networking websites are providing enough backlinks to increase the visibility of the website and helps achieving positioning in top 10 search results, So it is a common belief among the top internet marketers also that SEO is going to be dead.

But there is a problem with this method of gaining backlinks, any person can open an account in social media websites without doing any real investment and then gets the authority to give feedback about any product/ service, whether he has much knowledge in that particular domain or not. Even sometimes it happens so that brand names of big companies are misused by various people through social networking websites. So if search engine will start giving much importance to these types of posts then it will surely affect their search result and in turn the user satisfaction. This would not be desirable by the major search engines as Google and Microsoft earn quite a lot from providing significant results from these search engines, so they need to keep their algorithm up-to-date in-order to deliver the best quality results. So as long as Google and Microsoft like big players are in business, SMO will not have much impact on the search results and SEO will remain in the internet industry.

85% of people still use search engine to satisfy their primary business or personal need. Now let us imagine a situation in which someone is using social media to promote his website without optimizing his website. Surely no one would like to believe on that as Social media is generally used to take second opinion about the product/ service. So if your website is not optimized and you straightaway want to market it through social media then your efforts will go in vain.

With out SEO the internet will be full of spam. Can you imagine a situation in which search engine is replaced by some of the social networking website like twitter or facebook and people start getting the results on the bases of their total number of followers? So the brand which has the highest number of followers will get listed first in that social networking website. Then the whole creditability of search engine will be lost and people will have no faith in search engine. I think they will no longer use the search engines for any of their needs.

Social Media will surely affect Google's real-time search results but high Page Rank websites will dominate the search results.

We need to understand that the role of SEO is not restricted only to provide quality backlinks but also
  • SEO is used to promote websites in such a way that they can be easily understood by search engines.
  • SEO helps increasing the visibility of the website for the defined keywords
  • SEO also helps your website to achieve higher rank in the search engine.
So according to my experience, SEO is not going to die any time in near future, but its going to further evolve and provide us better results. Do let me know about your viewpoints related to this topic.

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