The end of seo?

[hassen1]

The reason all of this is significant is that it means, essentially, that the second most popular search engine on the face of the earth has just admitted that organic search has failed. While it’s fun, in theory, to have the option of searching through the 8,058,044,651 web pages that Google offers, most searchers really only want to see one page, or maybe five pages, or maybe ten. You use search because you need to find a needle in a haystack in the ocean that is the Internet very, very quickly. Being forced to read through dozens of SERP results whose merits are hard to evaluate - even if they really are honestly relevant to your search - can feel like a waste of time. With Search Subscriptions, Yahoo! has effectively admitted this, and made a step toward making it better.

But while organic search might have lost some of its charm, SEO has gained a tremendous amount of importance for the top-brand companies. Because, if subscription search catches on as well as it does, then two things will happen: 1) people will increasingly use the search engines for what is, in effect, site-search; and 2) you’ll be competing with your closest competitors in Search more fiercely than ever.

Which really means that 3) you should start looking at the search engines as your pre-site sitemap. And, in a SERP that only shows results from three websites - yours and those of your two top competitors - you’ll want to do everything you can to make sure that you win in that SERP.

So your SEO needs to be absolutely, positively stellar. Not only in terms of getting positioning for your site, but in terms of being able to describe and present exactly the right landing page to the searcher who’s looking for what happens to be on your site. Because if you don’t do a stellar job of that, that doesn’t mean that your competition won’t.

And, by the way, if your SEO isn’t working the same way it used to be, you’ll want to bolster your chances with that other great search engine weapon - SEM.