Marketing Technology for Growth

In part one of this four-part blog series, The Four Pillars of the SEO 2.0 New World Order, I talked about the importance of clarifying your target market in order to better cater to the needs of your intended audience. I also explained how Informational, navigational and transactional web pages lead your prospects through the buying cycle, helping increase website conversion.

As your brand’s virtual storefront, your website can be a powerful tool to communicate your message, attract prospects and generate leads online. But how do you get there? Google’s Panda update was a high-profile example of how search engines are changing the way they view online content, favoring fresh and original content over static keyword-laden copy. Business owners, SEO experts and content marketers the world over are trying to figure out the best way to react to these changes. I’ve been reading and writing a lot about this in recent months – confusion about the future of search is widespread.

The other day, an old friend asked me an interesting question. Is traditional SEO dead? I asked him how he defined “traditional” SEO, to which he replied, “you know, keywords, link building, all that stuff.” After laughing for a moment as he stripped such a complex practice down to one pithy phrase, I assured him that traditional SEO as defined is far from dead. SEO methods such as link building and relevant keyword usage should still be practiced, and are indeed critical tools to drive traffic and increase website conversion. Rather, as the online marketplace becomes a more sophisticated ecosystem, the rules of the game have changed, and more is demanded of online marketers.

To set up a Google+ brand page or not to set up a Google+ brand page? That is the question.

In recent days, the Internet talking heads have been ganging up on Google+ over some new data published by research firm comScore. Their research found that visitors using personal computers spent an average of about three minutes a month on Google+ between September and January, versus six to seven hours on Facebook each month over the same period. Pundits were quick to draw dire conclusions: "Nobody wants another social network right now," said Brian Solis, an analyst at social-media advisory firm Altimeter Group. For those who already use Facebook, "Google hasn't communicated what the value of Google+ is”¹

In January of 2012 Google introduced “Search Plus Your World,” an integration of Google’s Internet search engine and its Google+ social network. In one move, the entire social graph of over 90 million Google+ users was funneled into Google’s growing knowledge graph.¹ Industry experts are still trying to sort out the impact of Google’s new social search on SEO, specifically on page rankings. However, we know a few things for sure:

In a recent interview with Mashable, Google SVP Amit Singai discussed the direction they are trying to take their search capability.  Google wants to transform words that appear on a page into entities that mean something and have related attributes. It’s what the human brain does naturally, but for computers, it’s known as Artificial Intelligence (AI). Singhal admits that it is his dream to build the fictional Star Trek computer (for all your nerds out there, it's known as LCARS, or Library Computer Access/Retrieval System-sounds like Google, doesn't it?) in that you could ask it virtually any question and get an intelligent answer. An exciting master plan, to be sure. However, I question whether Google’s AI search engine would serve humankind in a benign manner like the Star Trek computer, or use its vast knowledge and AI chops more perniciously, like HAL 9000, the onboard computer in Kubrick’s classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I read a statistic the other day that made me do a double-take because it upset my natural assumptions about US consumer statistics. By 2017, the Millennials (aka Generation Y), currently in their mid-teens to mid-30s, will have more spending power than any generation.

I recently read Tom Brokaw’s book “The Greatest Generation,” where he defines the men and women who participated in World War II as “the greatest generation any society has produced.”¹ He goes on to argue that these men and women exhibited certain common characteristics such as duty, honor, sacrifice, humility, selflessness, strength in the face of chaos and remarkable adaptability.