|
March 05, 2007
Danny Sullivan has written an interesting post at Search Engine Land that looks at some of the ramifications of personalized search on link building. In particular, he looks at Google Bookmarks and the possibility that other customizable services at all of the search engines could be harnessed to feed this rise in personalized search. As we've talked about before, the search engines (and especially Google) know a lot about us. The potential for personalized search is extremely vast. With everything that search engines know about us, they could theoretically get very good at personalizing our search results:
I'm sure the actual application of personalized search could go much further than this. But as Sullivan points out in his post, the personal habits of Internet users will have a big impact on the tides of traffic, SEO, link building, social networking, and the structure of information on the web. Tagging and attribute assignment will become even more important than it already is. And those alt tags and link titles? Yep… more so than usual.
I'm not sure it's time to start panicking just yet, though. Well designed sites with good, relevant content should do just fine in a world in personalized search. The overall traffic trends might shift. But the traffic being sent by a more personalized search should be more valuable traffic anyway. And with tips like those Sullivan mentions, a little lost exposure can easily be compensated for.
I'd rather invest my time, effort, and resources on the needs of a smaller, more targeted audience than a massive conglomerate of the entire web anyway. It just means site owners will have to be more on their game (which should benefit end users).
It's like the retail world. Some stores get "foot traffic", or visitors that don't set out with the intention of visiting… but just happen upon the store on the way somewhere else. Other stores are "destination stores", meaning people set out specifically for the store. Traffic to destination stores isn't usually as high as those with a lot of foot traffic. But destination stores usually have more devoted, long-term customers that spend more money with them.
And that'd be okay for your website… right?
Post a comment
|
|
