Dipping into the Blogpond

It’s actually taken me a couple of days of mulling this one over before actually putting fingers to keyboard. Mark Fletcher wrote a post on Friday on the Findit blog entitled Was it good for you? SEO and faking search results. He begins:-

“Thanks to SEO experts and fat wallets, companies are faking it online. They’re getting ahead of others more suited to what the searcher is looking for. The level playing field that was the Internet has been bought.”

Ever since search engines were invented the internet hasn’t been a level playing field. As with business and in life, it’s all about playing the game. If you want to have a successful internet presence you HAVE to play the game. Full stop. End of story.

SEO (mum, this stands for Search Engine Optimisation – or, in layman’s terms, how to get to the top of the search results in search engines, like Google, for a given word or phrase) is the name of the game. You HAVE to have SEO to get your website noticed, otherwise you are just a floating brochure in cyberspace. It’s as necessary as advertising, and merely another cost of business.

SEO doesn’t HAVE to be expensive. But it is a lot of hard work. There is a plethora of websites and blogs offering a wealth of information, so it is possible to educate oneself and implement these strategies with some guidance. But be prepared for a lot of hard work.

Mark goes on to say “While we keep hearing that local is the game in town, local is a con. Search the Yellow Pages, True Local or My Local and experience the frustration first-hand. Rarely do local results on the first page provide what you are actually looking for“.

I think the quality of search results rely on the experience and skill of the searcher. It is up to the searcher to define the parameters for the search. If the search term is vague or the parameters too broad, then the results will reflect this. I think on the whole Yellow Pages and My Local do a pretty good job at displaying local results (as does dLook, particularly using our “refine your search” options). TrueLocal is a whole other kettle of fish. You have to give preference to paying customers, or else what’s the incentive to pay? It’s the old adage you get what you pay for. Free listings shouldn’t be prioritised over those paying.

To Mark’s next point “…Consumers are frustrated with featured and sponsored ads. They want search results and not noise“. Are we frustrated with featured and sponsored ads? Not if our traffic statistics are anything to go by. Sponsored ads are often highly relevant – if they’re not then the click through rate falls, Google applies their algorithms & advertisers become priced out of the AdWords market for that word or phrase. Let the paying advertisers suffer in the hip pocket if they are being frivolous with their marketing. Again it boils down to the skill of the searcher – the more specific the search, the higher the quality of the results.

Further Mark adds “With venture capitalists and bean counters driving the monetisation push, we have lost the way of the Internet being by and for the people.”

WTF? Are we talking about a Civil War here? It would be wonderful to live in such a benevolent Utopia. The fact of the matter is that running an internet business involves web hosting, servers, development, maintenance, employees and GASP! advertising. A website is like any other business it needs to make money to justify its existence – well at least in the majority of instances. How sustainable is a website going to be in the long run if it has no revenue model? Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for philanthropy but if you can’t make enough to satisfy the bean counters & your investors, then there will be nothing to be benevolent with at the end of the day.

I applaud Mr Fletcher’s initiative, and his attempts to diversify his interests in a flailing old media market, but I’ll be interested in seeing how many of the Find It ideals are still being upheld in a year’s time.