michael owen hill

In his blog post, 2010: the year SEO isn’t important anymore?, Robert Scoble declares that the writing is on the wall for the sometimes obsessive and irrational focus on SEO for small business marketing Web sites.

Search engines are becoming better and better at serving up relevant results. SERP (search engine results page) ranking for small businesses is becoming less about how "optimized" the Web site is and other factors, such as third-party endorsement and local search profiles.

Another development that may affect small businesses is the fact that Google and Bing are now tapped directly into the Twitter firehose. Google recently changed the weight it gives social media and news outlets (particularly in relation to vanity search) and has rolled out a Google Labs project known as Google Social Search that integrates social media content into both standard and image searches.

To quote "@scobleizer," as Mr. Scoble is known on Twitter,

Google has built systems that aren’t Page Rank controlled anymore and are giving far better analytics to small businesses than they did a year ago. They know a LOT more about your behavior now other than you clicked on a link, even to the extent that they know whether you called that business or bought something and THAT is changing the skills SEO/SEM types need to have. No longer is it about optimizing search engine results and the new breed is going beyond just search engines to provide holistic systems that find and track customers not only on search engines like Google and Bing, but on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

While I doubt many truly believe that optimizing the coding, metadata and, to some extent, content of small business Web sites is still of tremendous value — along with compelling writing, attractive design, ease of navigation and general "conversion optimization" — the notion that the days when repetitious use of stiltified "SEO keyphrases," overvaluing of vanity search results (regardless of impact on conversion and thus ROI), and the persistent notion that SEO is somehow about "magic beans" and self-proclaimed "gurus" who often have only the most rudimentary understanding of common-sense marketing or the value of authenticity — this notion is highly appealing.