Horizontal Growth Versus Web 2.0: SEO – Search Engine Optimization

My whole argument, which I have put forth below, is based on the popular quote of Jack Welch, the former General Electric CEO, saying “An organization’s ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.”

The above quote, for me, is a thought-provoking dose that has doped my guts to assess an organization’s ability to learn and translate that learning into action rapidly. I don’t have any ounce of doubt at the ‘Ability’ of some of e-business sectors to translate the learning into action except a word -Rapidly! Although I don’t hold any management degree yet I do understand the significance of the word ‘Rapidly’ in a world where parivartan is taking place faster than the Einsteinian’s e = mc 2. The search driven model on the Internet displays fastest result and then comes user’s experience to click the site. For example, Google, the fastest grown search engine, displays the fastest results (0.05 seconds touches 300 to 700 Google machines across the country).

I’m really impressed with Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice-president for search products, who invalidates the popular adage -slow and steady wins the race -reigned us until web 1.0. It’s speed that encompasses a huge component to drive today’s e-space. To her, speed and web 2.0 go together. If this is true, all e-business has to catch up with speed.

Any e-business model, whether it is B2B, B2C or C2C, horizontal growth over a period of time should never be deemed as a good sign for good prospects for a very long time. An e-business organization has to think -what type of growth it wants -nonlinear horizontal growth or vertical growth? Should it really be happy over its horizontal growth? While its competitors are growing vertically, one can’t keep their fingers crossed. If so, there begins hunky-dory for it!

We are living on the cutting edge of web 2.0 where page views, PR, Meta data, etc. are continuously sweeping down. Search engines are adapting users’ experience. If users’ experience is good, the above parameters to judge the quality of a site from SE perspective become less relevant. Remember, a search engine is users’ driven but not SEO driven. The spider is smart to read the psychology of users and filter the results based on the human query and their quest. Nonetheless, it never means that the SEO as an industry is collapsed. The role of SEO here should be to understand the changing algorithm of SEs to capitalize the return.

The web 1.0 SEO tactic is no longer valid today. The web 2.0 SEO according to me is valid, which is as follows:

Web1.0 SEO tactics vs Web2.0 SEO tactics

Page views Reciprocal Links vs Accessibility

Keyword rich contents vs Interactive Content/user generated content

Meta tags vs Book marking/del.cio.ous/dig/BLs

SE submission vs Automatic Crawling by Spider

Directory submission vs Optional

HTML optimization vs AJAX optimization

Reliability on Search engine PR vs Users’ PR (public relation)/network,

CMS Optimization Aggregation vs Syndication

CMS optimization vs Wikis/Blogs

Now, you can better judge where an organization is –in Web 1.0 (outdated world) or web 2.0 (updated world)! Whether it is progressing horizontally or vertically? SEO as an industry should learn to adapt the changes brought to by web 2.0 to ensure effective service for an organization.