I hated the term “SEO” from the very beginning, simply because it is an abbreviation of “search engine optimization”, which is optimized around Google, Bing, Baidu and other search engines.
But this statement itself is unhealthy as if we have become the licking dogs of search engines. If you use “SEO” as the cornerstone of your entire knowledge system, you are doomed to failure in the future.
So if you want to build the right SEO system and get a steady stream of traffic from your website, you must be absolutely correct in the most fundamental place, that is, the understanding of “SEO”, otherwise something will go wrong.
In this article, I will express my views around the following outline and you:
Outline.
1 “our relationship with SEO.
Where is the end of 2 ‘SEO?
Why doesn’t traditional SEO work?
4. The most correct SEO method.
Our relationship with SEO.
In fact, we are the content providers of search engines, without us to do content, search engines can not develop and grow, we and search engines are a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship.
I like to call my job “SIO”, that is, “search intent optimization”. Search intention optimization, which is what I have been doing.
So why do so many people in the industry say that SEO is dead over the years? Because the “SEO”, which represents the technocracy, is gradually failing, it used to be impossible to get Google’s ranking quickly by cheating. Google can identify cheating very quickly through artificial intelligence (SEJ once published an article about Rank Brain), and fighting Google is tantamount to death.
Even if you can get up the rankings through temporary cheating when Google upgrades its algorithm N times a day, one of the updates will crush you, so in a narrow sense, SEO is really dead.
But the “SIO”, which represents the content school, is on the rise. I see more and more foreign colleagues who have devoted most of their energy to content production.
For example, Brain (https://backlinko.com/blog), such as Neil (https://neilpatel.com/), are using their influence to promote content marketing, rather than complicated technologies, which excites me because it makes my work more meaningful.
Where is the end of SEO?
The job of a search engine is very simple, which is to match “content” with “search intention”.
I hope to see this one day in my lifetime:
All webmasters no longer have to focus on in-site optimization. Google uses AI algorithm to automatically collect website content, automatically generate the most appropriate title and description, and automatically present the most appropriate results to the people who need it most, so as to achieve full automation at the content collection level and thousands of people in the content push.
To put it bluntly, search engines can present the most appropriate content directly to the people who need it most.
Now there is a faint sign, for example, people from different countries search for the same word and get completely different content, and people with different shopping habits get different results from searching for the same product name. This is the embryonic form of “a thousand people with thousands of faces”.
And the more the mobile Internet develops in the future, voice search is bound to become more popular, and eventually, it will keep pace with text search. To be honest, what questions I want to search every day, I always ask Siri questions directly by voice, such as:
“Hey, Siri, what’s the weather like in Nanjing today?”
“Hey, Siri, who’s Yoshihiro Hisashi?”
“Hey, Siri, check the timetable of the high-speed train from Nanjing to Shanghai.”
For questions like this, Siri can usually tell me the answer directly. If the question is more complicated, Siri will look for the answer in the Safari browser and let me search it manually.
I think, if it is abroad, more people will not ask questions to Siri, but to Google to ask questions, right? I have a friend in the United States who told me that four or five-year-olds in the United States have questions by saying “Google now!” directly and using voice to find answers on Google.
To do this, Google will have to focus a lot of energy on matching “search intent” and “content”, which will broadcast the most appropriate content directly via voice rather than ranking.
Google’s “rich snippets” a long time ago actually shows this trend, for example, when I search for “Beijing time”, the Google search results page looks like this:
When I search for “Who is Maxwell?”, the following results appear:
Is it a bit like a voice search? Query questions, get the results directly on the search results page, rather than clicking in to get the results.
There is only one correct answer (or group) in everyone’s mind, and the more Google evolves, the more you will know about you. The answer you want has been figured out before searching.
In fact, it’s scary to think about it, because Google’s final form, like Skynet in the Matrix, is also very much like the “higher life form” described by the author of A Brief History of Tomorrow, Yuval Herali.
In the brief history of tomorrow, it is mentioned that there will be new religions in the future. Everyone in the religion believes in data, and everyone is sincerely in awe of the higher life forms made up of data. I guess I am about to join the teaching. , if there is a “data teaching” in the future, I think I will become a believer.
Why traditional SEO doesn’t work.
So in order to speed up the evolution of higher life forms and get a better ranking, the smartest thing to do must be “Dance with Google” rather than “Fight with Google”.
In the past, most SEO’s work was in “Fight with Google”. For example, I used clocking to hide a lot of text on the page, such as hiring writers to write junk articles for $5 each on Fiverr, such as blogging sites with PBN (Private Blog Network).
The purpose of these methods is to let Google put a piece of content that is not worthy of the first page to the first page, but this violates Google’s principles and undermines Google’s order.
Imagine a scene:
A medical company, A, wrote an inappropriate blog on its website about how to treat cancer, but all the suggestions were untested and risky.
The medical company cheated to elevate its ranking to the first page of Google. At this time, somewhere in the world, Xiao Ming, who could still be saved from cancer at the initial stage, found A’s article through Google and followed the advice inside to make cancer spread.
As a result, Xiaoming died.
At this time, Xiao Ming’s family jumped out to criticize Google, this incident caused an uproar, thousands of people in various countries jumped out to boycott Google, “fuck Google off” has become a buzzword all over the world.
Don’t think it’s impossible. Isn’t Baidu’s Wei Zexi incident a living case? Baidu used to have a lot of scenery, but how miserable it was after the Wei Zexi incident.
Of course, Google will never allow the “Wei Zexi incident” to occur on its own territory, so from a long time ago, it was extremely cautious when it included and ranked “YMYL (Your money your life)” pages.
So if you are still thinking about how to use technical means to fight Google, to “Fight with Google”, you will end up badly in the end.
The most correct SEO method.
The smartest thing to do is to follow Google, and you start from its nature and its principle, so that everything you do is in line with Google’s logic and is helping Google achieve its goals. Google can never punish anyone who supports it.
As mentioned before, Google works by matching “search intentions with the most appropriate content”, so as long as we optimize around users’ search intentions, we are helping Google achieve its goals.
What is the search intention? It’s a long story. Let me talk about it briefly.
The so-called search intention is actually the real intention represented by the keyword (or search query)). For example, when I search for “Beijing Time”, my intention is to know the Beijing time at this moment, for example, I search for “Who is Maxwell?”. My intention was to get to know Maxwell.
Sometimes there is no very direct connection between search intention and keywords, so you have to figure out the real search intention behind each keyword, which is very similar to the WeChat sent to you by your girlfriend.
For example, when your girlfriend comes to you, you say you are playing a game, and her girlfriend says back to you, “all right, then you go on playing”, her real intention is not to let you continue to play, but to ask you to shut down the game and go to her. Let you take action to prove that she is a hundred times more important than the game.
So to do a good job of SEO (I call it SIO), the most important thing is to understand the real search intention behind each keyword or search phrase, as long as we understand it well, we can write the content that best matches that intention according to that search intention, and let Google match our content with the search intention.
To sum up, SEO, which represents the technocracy, is indeed dead and will die more and more thoroughly in the future. It is impossible to lift the coffin board and cheat the corpse, but the “SIO”, which represents content marketing, has been reborn. The rise of SIO is a great good thing for both search engines and users who use search engines.
